I walked up to a house in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Kinda middle of nowhere.

I was interviewing for a role as the first marketing hire at an early stage tech company. I had prepared frantically for every question they might ask. Because I had no idea what I was doing.

The night before, I had probably frantically searched Nordstrom Rack for the blazer, pants, and heels I was now uncomfortably wearing to try to look 5 years older and infinitely more experienced.

I pull up in my little Toyota Corolla.

And... it’s a house. In the middle of a California suburb.

This can’t be right. I must have the wrong address.

But I’m there and I see the number on the gate and it’s right. So I walk up, hesitantly ready to knock, and I see a sign on the door.

It says “the clinic is closed.”

I have to force myself again to go through with the knock.

So I knock.

Some doors don’t look like doors

The door opens. A normal looking person answers. The living room is full of desks.

After the sweaty handshake that I tried to cover up with an enthusiastic and confident sounding hello, I’m like... what’s with the sign on the door? The clinic is closed?

He’s like, oh yeah, about that. This house used to be a weed clinic.

So we had to put the sign up so people would stop coming by to buy weed.

I laughed and somehow felt a little more comfortable after that.

We sit down at the kitchen table. Nothing but a basic wooden bench and table. The CEO and another leader. The CEO asks if I want coffee. It’s like 4pm and I say yes. He pours me some. It’s terrible and very cold.

We have a great interview. I feel pretty good. I’m brimming with excitement. And most of all I feel like, wow, these people are awesome.

There’s a building energy here. A creating energy. A feeling that anything is possible.

We’re wrapping up and they say something that makes my little glowing spark of hope crumble.

“Well, you’re the least qualified and youngest candidate we’re interviewing.”

I walk out.

They hired me anyway.

The part no one tells you about

That was my first experience as a zero to one marketer. I loved every second.

I worked 12 hour days. The coffee shop I liked on the way to work opened at 7am and I was heading over too early, so I had to switch to a different one.

I got to learn from and build with some of the best in the business. People who I deeply respect today.

That company is now worth $1.6 billion. Eyeing an IPO.

All because I took the leap to go back to zero and build from nothing.

What most people forget about going zero to one is that you first have to go to zero. And zero is an act of courage that most people are allergic to.

It feels uncomfortable. It feels like pulling up to a house in the suburbs in a blazer that doesn’t quite fit, wondering if you should even knock.

And then I went and did that again.

Four times.

Second startup, first product marketing hire. Got acquired by Oracle.

Third, I left Oracle to be the 4th employee. Grew them to an $850 million valuation, 300 people, and a CMO title.

Now on my fourth. Left that to join a pre-seed startup.

And in between all of those, I moved. From LA to San Francisco to San Diego to Miami. Every single time I moved without knowing a soul.

Zero has a feeling

Every single time I jumped off a cliff to zero, that fearful feeling came back. And then the ensuing loneliness of building from nothing.

A CEO who doesn’t understand marketing and thinks it’s just events and case studies.

A “why aren’t we doing this?” email at 11pm on a Tuesday that makes your heart jump into your throat. And then getting those emails every few days.

The early Monday morning spiral thoughts over steaming coffee, wondering how you can possibly prioritize the 10,000 things on your to do list.

Those Friday 5pm spiral thoughts rattling around in your head, wondering if your strategy is right.

Standing sweating in front of the board presenting a plan that you feel strongly about but you know might fail anyway.

Failure follows you like your own shadow. Always looming. Stretching longer the closer you get to the light.

And underneath all of it, the loneliest part. The part I’ve written about before and will probably keep writing about because it never fully goes away. The feeling that no one around you understands what you’re building or why it matters. That you’re pouring yourself into something invisible. That the people sitting next to you, the ones who have a rhythm and a pipeline and a number to hit, look at you and genuinely don’t know what you do all day.

That feeling never fully goes away. Not after the first company hits unicorn status. Not after the acquisition. Not after the title. Every time I chose zero again, there it was waiting for me.

The world just went to zero

The thing about zero to one is this.

We’re all at zero.

The world has changed. AI among other things blew it all up. With AI, we’re all at zero.

In the past, you could go zero to one and then you’re good. You’ve made it. You can hang out. You can coast.

Today that doesn’t work.

We’re all scrolling LinkedIn feeling behind the times, like the entire world is sweeping past us while we fade into irrelevance.

Everyone is automating their entire lives while we’re still struggling with the thorny things. Keeping our sanity with a crazy calendar, with spilled coffee and typos and bad hair days. Everyone claiming to be automating their teams away while we’re still trying to find that one hire we really think we need.

We’re looking at the enthusiastic hand waving, the fake automations people have built that when you dig in have some real problems. We’re either panicking or rolling our eyes and shrugging our shoulders, but either way, we feel like we’re failing. Like we suddenly know nothing. Like we’re afraid to say it out loud in case someone judges us for being behind.

We’re all being challenged to go to zero.

It’s not about the knowledge in your head anymore. It’s about the ability to go zero to one over and over and over and over again.

New business plan. New product roadmap. New vision. New story. New tech making new things possible and old things obsolete.

I’ve heard it said there’s no such thing as expertise anymore. There’s only the ability to go zero to one, to build and rebuild.

Creative problem solving is far more valuable than “best practices” expertise that might be relevant today and irrelevant tomorrow.

The ability to jump off that cliff. Find something beautiful on the other side. Learn, grow, build, rebuild. Try again. That’s valuable forever.

The knock

I think about that girl standing in front of a house in the suburbs a lot. The one in the Nordstrom Rack blazer with the sweaty palms and the terrible cold coffee.

She had no idea what she was doing. She was the least qualified candidate.

She knocked anyway.

And for the person who has already knocked. Who sat at the kitchen table. Who is now sitting at one of those desks in the living room trying to build something from nothing.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of going zero to zero to zero to zero…it’s not just the most beautiful and fulfilling way to live this one wild life, it’s essential. It’s alive. It’s adventure, it’s growth, it’s beauty. It’s humbling. It’s worth it.

And it’s the most valuable skill right now.

I remember at one point painfully confessing to my executive coach that I didn’t know what I was doing.

He looks at me with wide eyes and gasps, “you’re saying you’ve never done this before? You’ve never done this job, in this market, at this time, with this team, and this product? Shocker! No one has!”

You’re not alone. We’re all right there at zero with you.

The courage to take the leap might take you somewhere you could only have dreamed of.

It was 7 AM on a flight from Miami to Phoenix. Window shades pulled down everywhere. The cabin was dark. The teenager to my right was scrolling TikTok. An elderly woman a few rows up was watching something with a lot of drama and fake tans. The man in the seat beside me was fast asleep, hat pulled over his eyes.

I was in the exit row, aisle seat. Steaming coffee on the tray table. Laptop on my knees.

3 terminal windows open in a vertical layout, horizontally stacked so I could flip between them. Dark mode. Code-y looking text scrolling across the screen.

I was building copy and wireframes for a whole new website. Running a campaign strategy that involved merging 4 messy lists with overlap and missing data. And building a system that would scrape my call transcripts every week, identify topics that would make good LinkedIn posts, and research people in my network talking about similar things to surface what’s hot.

I had made it. I was basically an engineer. And I felt on top of the world.

But here’s the thing about that feeling. It was about 2 weeks old. And before it had been several weeks of something very different.

The Monday night that broke me

Rewind 2 weeks. It was a Monday. I had spent the entire day, and the weekend before it, trying to get a custom GPT to synthesize sales call transcripts for a messaging project. The problem was simple. I needed insights extracted across several categories from about 20 transcripts. The execution was a disaster.

If I gave the GPT even a couple of transcripts at once, it would either hand me back something so vague it was useless or it would hallucinate. I’d double check the output and realize it was making things up. Citing quotes that didn’t exist. Attributing insights to the wrong person.

So I found a process that technically worked. Manually export each transcript. Run it through the GPT with the same prompt. Get it to output into a table format. Copy the table. Paste it into a spreadsheet.

One by one. Row by row. 20 times.

Embarrassingly high value work for a CMO who had grown multiple companies to billion dollar valuations. Real productive.

That night, my phone lit up. A group text with a few women I deeply respect. Powerful execs, close friends. One of them had sent “Guys claude code is nuts. I am creating a super agent over 7 other agents.”

Someone asked if she knew how to code. Someone else asked how she was writing the prompts. She said she was using Claude Code in Visual Studio Code and then talking to Cowork when she needed more support.

Whatever the hell that meant.

I texted back: “I hate this conversation. I tried Cowork today and I think I’m bad at AI.”

Someone responded that they were in a thread where it was all anyone talked about for months. Someone else said it was totally overwhelming, that she was definitely losing sleep.

I tossed my phone across the room and went for a walk. Ignored it the rest of the night.

The thing about feeling behind

I can handle hard things. I’ve moved to 4 cities knowing no one. I’ve been the first marketing hire 3 times, building everything from zero with no playbook and no team.

But something about feeling behind the times hit differently.

I’m obsessed with optimizing myself. Training blocks, habit stacking, sticky notes with priorities. The fact that I knew I had wasted time doing something in a clearly non-ideal way made me furious. Not frustrated. Furious.

Late last year I had left an incredible CMO role at an $850M valued company where I’d been the 4th employee and grown everything from scratch. Part of why I left was because I saw all these AI native companies and I wanted that. I wanted a blank slate. I wanted to be in builder mode with these new tools. I wanted them to make me a superhuman.

And here I was. Pissed at a text from my friends on a Monday night after copying and pasting hundreds of times.

The least productive week that changed everything

The next morning was a Tuesday. My calendar was light. I moved even the few meetings I had.

I was going to figure out this Claude Code thing if it killed me.

Sun streaming in. Biscayne Bay and ocean stretching out beyond the window of my high rise in Miami. Boats going by, a bird or two, jet skis out there. And me, hunched over my laptop like a hacker. Feeling like I’d found the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

It was probably one of the least productive days I’d had in a long time. Which led to one of the least productive weeks I’d had in a long time.

And it changed everything. You truly do have to slow down to speed up sometimes. That week was proof.

Context is the unlock

The day before I had tried Claude’s Cowork feature. It made a doc instead of outputting a stream of text.

I was like, whoopdie doo. Who cares. This is pointless.

But that Tuesday I started reading setup guides. Maybe 3 different ones, all saying different things. A couple of them mentioned something important. Every Cowork session starts with zero memory.

Unlike ChatGPT, which decides what to remember about you, Claude lets you build the memory yourself through a file called claude.md.

This was weird for me. I never use local folders or files. People had told me Claude could create Word docs and I was like, ew. I never keep anything locally.

But fine. I made a folder called “claude” on my computer. A fresh empty folder. I happened to have a bunch of docs I’d already made for a Claude project at work: brand brain, voice and tone, insider language, copy formatting guides, current website copy, manifesto, a bank of customer quotes, SEO guidance. I dumped them all in.

Then I pointed Claude at the folder and said: make a claude.md file based on these docs.

I checked the folder. There was a new file. I opened it with preview. It had a clean summary of everything Claude needed to know about my brand in order to do good work.

And unlike ChatGPT’s memory, I could read it, I could edit it, I could make it whatever I wanted.

Pretty cool.

Connectors and the first mind-blown moment

The next unlock was connectors. I was still in the Claude desktop app, still using Cowork. I went into settings and saw a bunch of connectors. I connected a ton of them.

Email, calendar, project management, call transcripts. No API keys. Just hitting sign in for each one. Easy.

Then I asked Claude something I’d never been able to ask an AI before: write me a briefing for today. What urgent things need my attention.

It did. This task is past due. This person has been waiting for a response for days. Here’s your calendar for today with gaps between meetings mapped to your priority work.

My mind was blown.

I told it to make a Notion database for daily briefings and create a new page in there for each daily briefing.

And it did that.

When it fell apart again

Then I tried to have it write a webpage.

The copy was way too literal. I gave it feedback explaining why a certain line needed to change, and instead of understanding the note and adjusting, it used my exact feedback as the new webpage copy. Just... pasted my feedback in there as if that was the headline.

I felt like I was back to square one. How is this supposed to help me if it can’t even draft something half decent? And I had given it great background info.

Skills changed everything

That’s when I discovered skills.

Skills are like the instructions for a custom GPT. But instead of those instructions only being usable inside that little container of a custom GPT, Claude can pull in a skill anytime, anywhere. You can be in the middle of a conversation about something totally different and it will just realize it needs a certain skill and pull it in. You can take a skill and hand it to someone else and they can use it too.

I made a writing skill. The copy it produced was totally different. Way better. I’d say that sometimes Cowork even with a great writing skill isn’t quite as good as chat. But it’s pretty damn good.

Then I had a realization that blew my mind again. I could make a skill that uses other skills.

I built a product release skill. It knew what assets to execute for every launch: blog, social post, email to customers, community post. But it didn’t need to know how to write. It would pull in the writing skill to actually create each asset. A system of instructions that compound on each other.

Scheduling and the revenge moment

Then I discovered scheduling.

I scheduled that daily briefing to send me a Slack message every morning. I had it read my calendar, see what meetings I had, look at the gaps between them, and map out what I needed to do and when.

Then I scheduled something else: read every sales call we had last week and send me a Slack message breaking down anything important I should know as a marketing leader.

Not a super detailed prompt. The output was excellent. Every Friday morning I’d get a synthesis of that week’s calls. I updated it to send the notification to my whole team in our team slack so we could all benefit from it.

I was on fire.

The exact problem that had broken me on that Monday night, manually synthesizing call transcripts one by one, was now automated and running for my entire team without me touching it.

Opening the terminal

I still didn’t get Claude Code. The actual terminal.

I had read some setup articles on Substack. They talked about the terminal. I also noticed there was a code tab on the Claude desktop app that looked pretty similar to Cowork. So I asked a few people I trusted: what’s the difference?

They all said the same thing. “It’s just better.” “It has more access to stuff on your laptop.”

I was like, I don’t get it. Most of the work I’m doing doesn’t require any more access to my device. I tried the code tab in the desktop app and it seemed basically the same as Cowork.

But everyone kept insisting. So I opened terminal.

It looked like shit.

I found a setup guide from Cannonball GTM and started running through the steps. Ran into a bunch of bugs. Spent maybe 30 minutes debugging, trying to figure out what the hell it means by zsh and bash and staring at a lot of scary looking squiggly lines.

I was not sold.

Ghostty and feeling kind of cool

Then I listened to a Marketing Against the Grain episode, “Claude Code: Landing Page to Lead Magnet in 50 Minutes” with James, the Boring Marketer.

He mentions in passing that he uses something called Ghostty as his terminal app.

Wait. There’s other apps for terminal?

Turns out it makes it look less confusing. Still code-y, but simpler. I installed it. Asked Claude something random. It wrote back.

I felt kind of cool.

Firecrawl, skills from strangers, and HTML magic

James also mentioned something called the Firecrawl plugin for web research.

I tried asking Claude to do some online research first without it, find top influencers in a certain category. It couldn’t pull anything from recent social like LinkedIn.

So I installed Firecrawl. Tried again.

It created an entire Notion tracking board with so much data. Complete with top influencers, their follower counts across every social platform, topics they talk about, and things like potential warm intros and mutual connections.

Then James mentioned you can find skills other people have made and use them.

He had built one called “direct response copy” by researching all the great copywriters: Schwartz, Hopkins, Ogilvy, Halbert, Caples, Sugarman, Collier. I found it on GitHub and downloaded it. Used it on the website copy I’d been struggling with.

Insane upgrade. Great for headlines, subject lines, hooks, anything where you need to grab someone.

Then one more discovery. That campaign strategy I was working on in my second terminal window.

I realized I could ask Claude to make me an HTML visualization of the workflow. It laid out the entire campaign beautifully so I could present it to the team and walk away with a clear strategy we were all aligned on.

Example visual from my living, breathing Substack writing workflow:

Back on the flight

Two weeks after that Monday night, I was sitting in an exit row aisle seat at 7 AM, surrounded by people watching TV and scrolling their phones.

And I had 3 terminal windows open. Building a website. Strategizing a campaign. Creating a system that would turn my weekly conversations into content ideas and cross-reference them against what’s trending in my network.

The same person who had been copy-pasting transcripts one by one into a custom GPT was now running 3 AI workflows in parallel on a flight to a marketing retreat.

All 3 were working toward something bigger than the individual project.

They were making me into the builder I had left my last job to become.

You have to slow down to speed up

That angry Monday, that “unproductive” Tuesday, and the messy week that followed, was the most valuable time I’ve spent in years.

I didn’t learn AI from a course or a masterclass. I learned it by clearing my calendar, accepting I had no idea what I was doing, and just building. Badly at first. Then less badly. Then well enough to feel like a different person.

Anyone can do this. Terminal is not that scary. You kind of feel like a badass once you’re in there.

And Cowork is still the best place to start.

• Start with Cowork.

• Install connectors.

• Build a claude.md file so it actually knows who you are.

• Make your first skill.

• Schedule something. Get one thing running without you.

• Then open the terminal. Install Ghostty so it looks less terrifying.

• Try Firecrawl.

• Find a skill someone else made.

• Ask it to make you something visual.

You’ll feel kind of cool.

And somewhere between that Monday night and that Tuesday morning, between throwing my phone across the room and watching the sun come in over Biscayne Bay, I realized the gap was never about talent or technical ability.

It was about giving myself permission to be bad at something long enough to get good at it.

I remember staring at the LinkedIn ads dashboard, scrolling slowly.

There’s a specific kind of dread when you realize something is wrong but you don’t yet know how wrong.

The ads were live. They had been live.

And they were off.

Not dramatically off. Not catastrophic. Nothing that would make headlines.

Just… wrong.

A capitalized word that shouldn’t have been. A phrase our buyers would never use. A pluralization that subtly signaled we weren’t insiders. A design that felt subtly like a different company.

In any industry, there’s insider language.

If you mess up one little thing, pluralizing a word they wouldn’t, getting the capitalization wrong, using a word they would never use, these are seemingly small things that can create a world of separation between you and your buyer.

You can go from insider to outsider in a second.

How did this happen? Probably we hired a new contract designer and someone was trying to move fast and shipped something that wasn’t quite right.

And I had missed it.

Then I got a nasty message from someone on our team. Or, I didn’t get it. They posted it in a public Slack channel full of way too many people, just railing on a set of small mistakes that had gone out and were now running live as ads.

My chest went tight. I couldn’t even feel defensive.

Unfortunately, that person was right.

(But…putting everyone on blast in a public space is not necessarily what I would recommend either.)

This had slipped through without me noticing, meaning I didn’t have the right process in place to ensure this didn’t happen. When I wrote about what I’d do differently in my first 90 days, this was one of the blind spots.

But it could have been worse. It could have been an influencer or, god forbid, a customer railing on us in a public Reddit thread with thousands watching. Beating up these small mistakes in a public Slack channel with maybe a couple hundred internal only folks? Ok, could have been worse.

Was still a hard day.

I probably went home and made spaghetti and ate it in my bed before curling up into a ball.

I don’t remember all the details of that campaign and how it got created. Probably blocked them from my memory from the embarrassment. But I do remember feeling like an absolute failure and wanting to crawl into a hole and never do anything creative again.

Brand was living in my head

For a long time, I carried brand as intuition.

I knew what sounded right. I could feel when something was off. I could spot insider language instantly. I was the keeper of the brand.

That’s taste. And taste matters.

But taste that isn’t documented becomes fragile. As soon as the team grows, as soon as contractors enter, as soon as you increase velocity, taste becomes tribal knowledge.

And tribal knowledge eventually slips.

That day taught me some important things.

Lesson 1: We reinvent the wheel because we’re bored

First of all, sometimes we go off script as marketers because we’re bored. But some of the best brands out there are still working the same messages that worked for them for like twenty-plus years.

I remember when I was at the Exit Five Drive B2B marketing conference in Vermont last year, Sangram Vajre in his talk said something like:

The best brands don’t chase novelty. They repeat what works until it compounds.

That ad campaign wasn’t a creative failure. It was a systems failure.

Lesson 2: Brand can’t be tribal knowledge

Second of all, we need a really tight system for making sure it’s going to land with the buyer and avoid small mistakes.

We have too much technology at our fingertips to make these kinds of mistakes. And it doesn’t need to be a whole set of resources to review every single word.

Take the time to document the rules, the principles.

Are there words we never use? If those aren’t written down somewhere, why are you making this harder for yourself?

This should not be tribal knowledge.

One of the things I love about working with AI actually is that it forces you to think systematically. You need to write down all the rules, the learnings, the steps.

Lesson 3: Reinventing from scratch is slow

Thirdly, that set of ads was a pain to create actually.

All net new approach, every new component and word agonized over by someone on the team.

We must not reinvent the wheel unless we have to. And ironically, you can move way faster if you don’t reinvent the core components.

If you’re putting together pre-built pieces versus creating everything from a blank slate every time, it helps you move way faster.

Reinventing from scratch feels creative. But it’s slow. And it increases the surface area for mistakes.

Brand, messaging, and design should feel more like putting Lego blocks together than starting from scratch.

Not approaching brand as a scalable system is risky and time-consuming.

When brand lives as a scalable system, you don’t eliminate creativity. You focus it.

How to build a modular brand system

After that campaign, I built infrastructure. Not a PDF brand guide that no one reads. A working system.

Part 1: Messaging

I have a process where I create a bunch of messaging building blocks. These can all be put together in probably many different AI writing setups. Lately I’ve just been throwing them into a Claude project.

The Manifesto — the reason why you exist:

Before messaging pillars, before format playbooks, before component libraries, there’s the manifesto.

I’ve written an entire piece on why the first thing I’d build as a first marketer is a manifesto. It’s not a homepage headline. It’s a conviction document. The belief system that informs everything downstream.

Once that foundation is clear, you can build the operational layers.

Brand Brain — the strategic foundation. Includes:

• Positioning statement

• Elevator pitches (one-liner through full paragraph, copy-paste ready)

• Value propositions (overall + by audience segment)

• Key messages / pillars (each with supporting proof points)

• Buyer journey messaging (awareness, consideration, decision)

• Product messaging hierarchy

• CTA framework

• Approved proof points (stats table with usage rules)

Voice & Tone — how the brand actually sounds. Includes:

• Who we sound like

• Core voice principles

• Writing guidelines

• Do’s

• Don’ts

• Words and phrases we own

• Words and phrases to avoid

• Quality check

Audience Language i.e. IYKYK Glossary (optional but cool) — insider knowledge about the specific audience so that everything you write understands their world from the inside. Includes:

• Insider glossary (terminology with context for why each term is loaded)

• Example messaging per term / how to use it

• Guidance on how to signal “we’re one of you”

Format Playbook — rules for every content type you produce (emails, LinkedIn posts, case studies, etc.). Each format entry defines:

• When to use it

• Required structure and section order

• Length guidelines

• Headline and subject line rules

• Author / sender defaults

• Format-specific do’s and don’ts

• Voice and tone adjustments

Quotes Bank — a library of real customer quotes, tagged and scored so you (or AI) know which ones to pull for which situations. Each quote includes:

• Customer name, job title, and firm

• Theme category

• Pain point it addresses

• Strength score (1 to 5)

When you feed this into AI, it doesn’t hallucinate a brand that sounds soulless. It operates with a personality (and guardrails).

Sometimes AI isn’t the risk. Ambiguity is.

Part 2: Design

The key with design is building a component-based system.

Start with templates and components

The easiest example of this is on a website. Each webpage type is a template (this is a feature page). Within each page you have components (this is what customer quotes look like).

But this extends to your whole brand.

Think systematically

I love working with designers who have a product design background but then moved into marketing because they are amazing at this. Since they’re used to designing high volumes of pages with many similar components, they think in a systematic way.

In Figma or other tools, you can create components that can be used in different designs. Ideal case is when you want to update that component (our buttons used to be yellow and now we’re making them green), you can update it in one place and it updates everywhere.

Even if you don’t have it set up to update everywhere, it’s still helpful to think in banks of components.

Different approaches to building your component library

Organize what already exists

The simplest starting point is to take all the design components that already exist and put them in one place (eg Figma). That’s your source of truth.

A centralized component bank alone will make creating anything new so much easier.

Build from motion or video

One cool thing I saw a company do when they were going zero to one and creating a brand for the first time was contracting a motion graphics agency to create a video for them. As part of the video, the agency created a ton of awesome components: boxes, buttons, background textures.

They took all the components from the motion graphics video and turned those into their component bank.

Interactive brand tools

The most flexible version of this is something I’ve seen a lot of design agencies doing more of. Instead of just delivering a static PDF of “brand guidelines,” they turn brand guidelines into a web-based tool where you can check boxes, drag sliders, input specs, and output an on-brand creative asset for something you need. On brand but still unique.

The point is to assemble, not start from zero every time.

When brand lived in my head, every mistake felt personal

Here’s what surprised me most.

When brand lived in my head, every mistake felt personal.

When brand lived in a system, execution felt shared.

Less ego. More engineering.

Brand is taste. But much of taste can be defined. It needs infrastructure.

Otherwise it depends on one person catching everything at the right time. And that’s not scale.

Zero to one is intuition. One to scale is architecture.

I wrote about many of those zero to one lessons here: 9 hard lessons learned going zero to one

That day with the ads was painful. But it forced me to turn brand into something durable. Something repeatable. Something that could move fast without losing trust.

It started with a Slack message.

“The campaign is live!”

I stared at it for a second longer than I should have. Which campaign?

I scrolled up. Searched the channel. Opened an old planning doc. The name barely rang a bell. It had been four months since we’d first talked about it. Back then it had felt electric. The idea that would change the quarter. The thing we’d ship at lightning speed.

You know how it goes when you’re planning and that idea feels like the most game-changing thing for the quarter, and then you get to the end of the first month and realize it’s not even going to impact the quarter because it won’t be ready. Or it silently dies off in favor of other flashy objects.

Now it was live, and I could hardly remember why we were doing it. The moment had passed.

Because we were too slow.

The hardest part wasn’t the meetings. It was the mornings.

That morning the house was quiet. Too quiet. I was in my home office, trees swaying outside the window, Slack open, tabs scattered across my screen. Silence deafening.

Everything felt slow. Sticky. Like we were wading through mud.

I had a talented team. Thoughtful. Skilled. People who cared deeply about the work.

And yet our meetings felt like deja vu. Didn’t we talk about this last week? And the week before that?

The hardest part of that season wasn’t the meetings. It was the mornings.

The quiet, silent mornings where it just started feeling heavy. I’d stare out the window, wishing for even a damn crisis just to spark things up.

When I saw that Slack message, I felt annoyed. And embarrassed. And strangely numb.

Something is broken here, I thought. And if it’s broken, it’s probably me.

And if I was feeling that way, how must the rest of the team be feeling?

I wondered if this was just what happened as teams grew. Is this the inevitable tax of scale? Does everything slow down once you move beyond five scrappy people in a room?

The temptation was immediate.

I could fix this. I could sit in every meeting. Assign every task. Rewrite the briefs. Set all the deadlines. Wrap it up neatly in a project management system where I could see exactly who was slipping.

I could be the engine.

It would work. And it would limit the ceiling of my leadership forever.

My pride was blocking me

A few days later, I brought it to my executive coach.

“I don’t want to be the one with all the answers,” I told him. “I don’t want to be the only one driving.”

He asked me something simple.

“Is your team better than you at those things?”

I answered yes immediately.

Writing the copy. Planning campaigns. Coming up with creative ideas. Executing on deadlines. Making sure output would land with the buyer.

They were absolutely better.

“But do you believe that?” he asked.

Intellectually, yes. Emotionally, no.

And that’s when it hit.

Somewhere underneath, I believed I was better. That if I didn’t keep my hands on everything, quality would slip. That speed required my direct intervention.

My pride was blocking me.

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t arrogant. It was subtle. A quiet conviction that I could do it faster, cleaner, better.

And with that mindset, we were going nowhere.

The relief was physical. Like a wall crumbled in my mind. I felt humbled. Slightly embarrassed. But clear.

The problem wasn’t talent. It was structure.

And it was me.

Speed isn’t urgency. It’s clarity.

I don’t glorify speed for speed’s sake.

Life isn’t a fire drill. More often than not, we’re in a marathon, not a sprint. Urgency is not a virtue in and of itself.

But in most industries, you need speed to stay relevant. And being part of a team that’s learning, growing, and shipping is, to be honest, way more fun and fulfilling.

Marketing is a contact sport. You don’t know if something works until it’s in the world. You have to put it out there and see how people respond before you learn anything.

If you spend months planning the perfect thing and then launch it all at once and it flops, you haven’t protected quality. You’ve wasted time.

I read this article a while back and have probably read it 50 times over the years: Your Marketing Org is Slow. Here’s a Framework to Move Faster. Jaleh Rezaei wrote:

We weren’t slow because we were lazy. We were slow because we weren’t clear.

Too many handoffs. Too many priorities. Too many projects floating between people who didn’t fully own them.

It was conveyor belt marketing. Imagine twenty conveyor belts running at once, each person running around to various projects to do their part.

Copy to design. Design to dev. Dev to campaigns. Campaigns to analytics.

Every week it was, “We sent that over.” Next week, “We’re waiting on feedback.” The week after, “Let me check in.”

Four months later, the campaign was live. And the moment had passed.

That rock bottom moment sparked a journey for me on how to set up marketing teams that move fast, stay relevant, and build things they’re proud of.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with a few different team models. All for relatively small teams. I’ve managed up to 50 people before, but on average it’s usually closer to 5-15.

Model 1: The Squad Model

I’ve only run this one successfully with reasonably sized teams. I think my team was about 15 when I did this.

The squad model attempts to solve the handoff problem. The handoff problem was the reason that four-month campaign took so long.

Every time I asked about it, it was like, “Oh, we sent that messaging to design a week ago… let me check in with them.” Next week it was, “Oh, design sent it over to dev a week ago… let me check in with them.”

The squad model was simple. I organized the team into small cross-functional squads focused on a major area. ABM. SEO. Website testing. Lifecycle conversion optimization. A major content initiative.

The squads weren’t exhaustive to all marketing aspects. They were specifically focused on areas where we really wanted to move the needle that quarter.

Most important: each squad was self-sufficient.

They had everyone in there that they needed to get that project done. There were still some handoffs within the squad, but teams weren’t lobbing things over to other teams that had totally different remits.

Each squad had an owner, a squad leader, who was responsible for:

• Showing up to quarterly planning with a plan they’d already prepared

• Setting up the execution plan for that project

• Running a weekly meeting with their squad to drive toward the outcome

• Setting their goals

• Reporting weekly on those goals

When I switched to this model, I saw the team move what felt like 5x as fast. I’m not exaggerating.

And there was an aliveness to it. Structure. Clarity. Creativity came up because they could test and learn.

Honestly, I think people finally felt like they had a sense of ownership. That they could ship something and be like, “Wow, I did that.” They got to learn and build together but still in an agile way. They got to be a mini CEO of their area.

Speed returned because clarity returned.

Model 2: Tastemakers and Operators

This one works well for smaller teams or those really looking to take advantage of AI but not in an AI-slop kind of way.

It’s the hypothesis that most marketers will fall into two buckets: tastemakers and operators.

The Tastemaker

This person lives and breathes quality. They have the creative spark to make something magnetic, but it’s not ego-driven. It comes from a deep desire to understand the customer.

They’re obsessed with stories. They listen before they write. They might come from film, journalism, or content, but their real edge is their intuition. They know how to turn insights into emotion.

They know what good looks like. And they won’t ship anything less.

The Operator

This person loves systems. They’ll automate what others overlook. They’re the kind of person who starts to learn Python over the weekend, builds a Zapier workflow to automate their personal life, gets excited about it.

They build infrastructure so great ideas don’t die in a backlog. They learn fast, tinker constantly, and know how to turn chaos into a workflow.

Give them a pile of disconnected tools, and they’ll turn it into an engine.

One brings the spark. The other builds the engine. Both are essential.

On my team today, I see people naturally gravitating toward one or the other. And it’s incredible to see what happens when they pair up.

I’ve seen a lot of success with creating buddy pairs where you pair a tastemaker and operator together. The tastemaker drives the creative. The operator drives the engine.

In an AI-enabled era, this pairing is even more potent. AI can amplify both roles. But without someone guarding quality and someone building the workflow, you end up with noise.

Model 3: The One Thing Model

Ok, this is one I haven’t tried yet, but I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.

I was listening to a podcast (I think it was Simon Sinek’s A Bit of Optimism), and they were talking about how the greatest rarity in our lives is the ability to focus on just one thing for an extended period of time.

That switching between a bunch of things as we’re working gives us the illusion of making progress but is actually a very slow way to work.

So what’s the ideal setup?

All tasks go into a shared backlog. Everyone sees it. Every day, each person looks at the shared backlog and picks one thing. Just one thing for that day.

Not five. Not three. One.

The illusion of progress comes from switching between tasks. Real progress comes from depth.

The result is you’re constantly revisiting the most important things, not just each person doing it on their own but doing it together.

In my mind, this model would include dedicated deep work days. Before the deep work day starts, everyone looks at the shared backlog and chooses the most important thing. End of week, you have a show and tell where the team shares what they learned, what they built, what failed.

A place to share AI learnings but also show off what you created and how and why, and share what might help others.

The goal isn’t busyness. It’s momentum. And momentum is built on focus.

Other fun things you can do

Beyond structure, there are small rituals that build connection and clarity.

Personal and Professional Win

I used to start every marketing team meeting with everyone going around and sharing a personal and professional win from the previous week. Sometimes people would use their win to shout out someone else.

I had people years later come and tell me how much they loved that. You really get to know so much about people.

Weekly Top 5

I used to do this for my boss and have my team do the same for me. Every Monday, simple email. Just numbered bullet points 1 to 5, nothing else. What is the focus for the week?

We also did this as a Slackbot that everyone would respond to in thread, which I liked even more. We could see what others were focused on.

Quarterly Planning Ownership

Have others own sessions during planning. If you’re owning all the sessions, it’s not good. Let people step up and lead.

Vulnerability

Seems like a weird thing to put on a team list, but one of the most successful times I had with my team was when we had a giant goal, a super scary one. I opened up about how nervous I was. And it gave everyone else permission to be honest too.

None of these models matter if the leader doesn’t change first

After that conversation with my coach, the shift wasn’t dramatic.

It was 100 tiny moments.

Instead of saying, “A is better than B,” I would say, “What do you think?”

Instead of joining every meeting, I would say, “I trust you to run with this.”

Instead of answering a question in Slack, I would tag the person closest to it and let them respond.

At first, it felt unnatural. Restraint can be harder than control.

But slowly, the energy shifted. People stepped up. Not because they were forced to, but because space was created for them to.

I had been the bottleneck. Not because I was incompetent. Because I didn’t fully believe they were better.

If your team feels slow, ask yourself these questions

Are there too many handoffs?

Is ownership blurry?

Are priorities constantly shifting?

Are you quietly inserting yourself into everything?

Speed doesn’t come from pressure. It comes from clarity. From trusting your team enough to design a system where they can move without you touching every piece.

From deciding what matters. From shipping.

When I think back to that Slack message now, I’m grateful for it.

“The campaign is live.”

It felt like a failure at the time. But it was the moment I stopped trying to be the engine.

And started building one I believed in.

The Slack message landed at exactly the wrong time.

I was seven coffees deep, straight-backed in my desk chair, sun streaming through the window behind me.

The office was humming with activity somewhere beyond my door, but I didn’t notice. I was completely lost in numbers, leaned forward, elbows on the desk, jumping between an obscene amount of tabs. Spreadsheets, dashboards, ad campaign portals, conversion funnels. Number crunching at its finest.

It was probably 2pm, that thick part of the workday where time blurs and I am always just realizing that I forgot to eat lunch. I had a vision: track ROI down to the keyword level, optimize every ad based on what it was actually driving all the way to the bottom of the funnel instead of just lead-level conversion rates.

I wanted to slice paid performance down to the smallest possible unit so I could prove, with precision, that every dollar was doing its job. This was serious marketing. Responsible marketing. The kind that makes leadership feel safe.

The Slack message that broke my marketing plan

Then a Slack notification popped up in the top right corner of my screen and disappeared before I could grab it.

I scrolled up to find it. The message was from someone on my team who had done the job of our customer before joining us. They were our ICP, sitting right there internally.

It was just an offhand comment:

“Most of these people run ad blockers anyway.”

My hands froze on the keyboard. I felt myself slam back into my body from wherever my brain had been.

The channel consuming the largest portion of our budget wasn’t rooted in how our buyer actually bought. Or browsed. Many of them used DuckDuckGo. Many of them avoided ads altogether. Yes, the campaigns were driving demand. The numbers weren’t wrong. But they weren’t grounded in curiosity about the person on the other side of the screen.

When did proving ROI become more important than truth?

Being a good CMO meant having numbers to prove my value. I was afraid if I slowed down, if I questioned the system I was building, it would all get blown up. I would be forced to invest in areas where I couldn’t measure, take a leap of faith grounded in deep understanding of the buyer. That felt risky. Leadership would question everything if I didn’t have the numbers to back it up.

Years later, I sat on stage at the Exit Five conference in Burlington, Vermont, speaking to 250 B2B marketers. I shared an example of something I had done that worked really well. Ten hands shot up. Every single person asked: “But how did you measure it?”

Sitting on that stage made me flash back to my desk that afternoon. I cursed the attribution tools, the measurement obsession. Don’t get me wrong, data is incredibly valuable. But it can create a false certainty and kills the curiosity that leads to work that actually sparks something.

The minute I closed all those tabs, I felt guilty.

I hadn’t spoken to a customer or listened to a single sales call in months.

I had been so wrapped up in protecting my credibility and my team, that I’d forgotten something fundamental. I’d forgotten to be curious about the person I was speaking to.

7 ways to understand your buyer

1. Start with Reddit

In that moment, the very first thing I did was go down a giant Reddit rabbit hole.

Reddit is amazing for understanding your buyer because of its anonymity. People are incredibly honest. It’s generally vendor-free because you get trolled if you try to post anything promotional. You get raw perspectives: the jokes people make, the things they complain about, the acronyms they use, the things they love to rant about.

Reddit rants are my favorite source of creative inspiration.

And, I felt like an idiot having to Google half the acronyms they were using.

It made me feel like an outsider, but also excited by new understanding. I didn’t find one clean, tidy takeaway to plug into my strategy. But it gave me a sense of connection, a sense of the flavor of the people I was speaking to. It made me feel human again, less like a dashboard rotation bot.

The next time I showed up to leadership, it wasn’t just with dashboards. It was with stories and anecdotes. It felt messy and squishy, but I realized those little stories are far more memorable and impactful than any dashboard I have shown. There’s still a place for numbers. They’re just not everything.

2. Run a Marketing Shark Tank

I ran an event with my team where we pitched our craziest, wildest, boldest ideas (Shark Tank music opening the scene and all). The most important part: our sharks were internal folks who represented our buyer personas, who had done that job before or knew that type of buyer really well. We literally had name cards with buyer persona job titles on them.

My takeaway: It doesn’t matter what the executive team thinks. It matters what’s going to land with the buyer.

3. Do group call listening

This is so simple, but sometimes one-to-one time actually listening to a call is irreplaceable. You can spend all day analyzing transcripts with AI, but there’s something different about just listening, feeling the emotion, seeing the expressions, hearing the tone of skepticism or hope.

The best way I’ve found to do this is as a lunch and learn. Doing it together.

We’d hang out and listen to a call together, pausing every couple of minutes to share a new realization. This also helps because if you block your own calendar to listen to calls, half the time you’ll skip it (you know it’s true). But if you do it together, you get the benefit of shared insights and you actually do it.

4. Find your ICP internally

This is what saved me that afternoon.

People who have done the job of your customer are incredibly valuable…find those people inside your company and ask for their help.

I remember a time I had launched a podcast, we brainstormed the name with our solutions engineers who were on calls with buyers all day. They threw in ideas and voted. The result was an inside joke to the buyer that immediately connected.

5. Use transcript analysis with AI

It’s useful, of course. What I like to do is write a prompt that asks for pain points, buying triggers, objections, the terms we should be using verbatim that people use a lot, etc. And then an interesting way I’ve found to get a little deeper is asking for “inferred emotions.”

People generally don’t actually say their emotions on calls, but AI can do a decent job at least sparking some curiosity about what “inferred emotions” are underneath those objections.

Ideal way to set this up is through a system that can parse call transcripts as they come through (if you try to just dump a bunch of transcripts into chatGPT it tends to max out the token window and you get weird result - doing them one by one you’ll get the best results, and a workflow to do this as they come through saves you a lot of copying and pasting).

Here’s some things I look for:

• Internal/external speakers (important cleanup step ensuring AI is identifying your internal folks vs the prospect/customer)

• Pain points

• Buying triggers

• Context on what their world looked like before looking at your solution

• Most common use cases

• Frequently requested features/gaps

• Objection themes

• Buying signals

• How they describe your company in their own words

• Value drivers

• Problem statements in their own words

• Most emotional quotes

• Competitor mentions

• Status quo mentions

• Voice of customer gold (phrases used a lot we should be using verbatim)

• Inferred emotions

6. Watch website session replays

You can learn more about how people interact with the website from watching 20 session replays from something like HotJar than from trying to dig through a bunch of trend data.

You see exactly where people get stuck, what they click on, what they hover over the longest, what they look at right before they bounce.

It’s the difference between reading about something and actually seeing it happen.

7. Survey your buyer

I’ve done this where you survey your buyer on where they get their information, what they want to know, what events they go to, who they follow on social media.

A successful way I’ve found to get people to actually fill it out: tell them you’ll share the insights afterwards.

Everybody feels a little behind and wants to know what their peers are doing. As a bonus, you get an awesome research piece you can publish (and tag all those people on social). Plus, you know exactly who they trust, which channels to focus on, and what to say.

Here’s an example of a survey I’ve done that’s worked really well (easy to set up in TypeForm or other):

What topics do you actually care about?

[Multi-select] Select all that apply.

[insert topic areas]

What’s your go-to content format?

[Single-select] Select all that apply.

• Text

• Podcast/Audio

• Video

• I like to mix it up

What sources do you trust for [insert topic area] insights: written, podcasts, or otherwise?

[Open text] (List any blogs, newsletters, podcasts, or reports you actually follow.)

Who do you follow on social for [insert topic area] insights?

[Open text] (List any Instagram accounts, TikTok channels, YouTube channels, LinkedIn influencers, hashtags, X accounts, etc.)

What events do you regularly attend?

[Open text] (List conferences, events, meetups, or webinars you make time for.)

Which online communities do you hang out in?

[Open text] (Think Slack groups, LinkedIn communities, Reddit forums, or anywhere else you talk shop.)

Want to see the results? (Optional)

Drop your email below, and we’ll send you the final insights once they’re compiled.

8. Communities

Similar to Reddit, I see communities becoming more and more popular and engaged right now (especially niche, focused, and private ones) because everyone feels behind with AI and wants to know what their peers are actually doing.

Because everyone wants to prove that they’re AI pros, oftentimes the more honest questions happen behind closed doors rather than in public places like LinkedIn.

This could be a Facebook group, a Circle community, a Slack group, etc. Bonus if you launch your own community, that’s a real gold mine not just for questions people are asking about your problem in general but also your company specifically.

9. Going to events

Whether it’s a conference or a dinner, going in person to an event can be the ultimate crash course in your messaging, your pitch, their objections, responses, etc. You can test in real time and you’ll easily see the questions can get asked over and over when someone walks up to your booth or sits near you at a dinner.

Protect your focus

Everyone right now is obsessed with automating everything, trying to do more and more with AI. They’ve forgotten about the buyer, the person who’s actually valuable to understand. They’re so wrapped up in their own fear of falling behind.

I’ve been there too. Performing for the sake of your job, your paycheck, your career safety. That’s a hard thing to work against.

But the best strategy shows up when you understand the buyer so completely that your next move feels obvious.

That proximity, that curiosity, that humanness makes messaging and growth channels clear. The work you’re doing starts to spark something instead of just filling a dashboard.

You weren’t hired to optimize everything. You were hired to make impact. And it makes the job a lot more fulfilling and clear when you feel connected to that person on the other side.

I remember the room more clearly than the lesson.

A small office with worn, stained carpet. A ping pong table shoved into the corner like a personality trait. A big screen on the wall with a blank spreadsheet projected onto it, too bright for the size of the room.

It was a planning meeting, though at the time I didn’t have language for what kind. It was me, the only full-time marketing hire, our CEO, our head of sales, a fractional CMO I was learning everything from, and one of our investors who had been through this movie before.

I was nervous in that way you only are when you care deeply and don’t yet know if you deserve to be in the room.

Up until then, I thought being good at marketing meant executing faster and harder than everyone else.

I remember those days well. There was a coffee shop on my way to the office that opened at 6am, and I had to reroute my entire morning because it wasn’t open early enough for how fast I was trying to get to work. Sundays spent alone in the office, trying to outrun the mountain of things I was attempting to do.

In a way, those days were glorious. I was learning so much.

I’m a strong believer in push and pull motivation. If you have that pull - that obsessive energy to work on something, to learn, to immerse - then let it happen. Don’t block it. There are seasons where intensity is exactly right.

But that season has an expiration date. At that point in my career, I didn’t know I was already nearing it.

The planning meeting where effort stopped being the metric

Back in the room, the spreadsheet started to fill. Conferences we were doing. Side events we were proud of. Sponsored webinars. Email campaigns.

I was talking. A lot.

Trying to put things on the board. Trying to claim credit for the work I was doing. Trying, in retrospect, to prove that I was useful.

The fractional CMO was offering ideas. Sales was asking for assets they wanted. The CEO had a handful of exciting, scattered thoughts. It was a familiar chaos. Everyone contributing. Everything feeling important.

And then the investor stopped us.

“No,” he said. “We’re not starting with tactics.”

The room went quiet in that uncomfortable way where you know something true is about to land.

The moment someone took the tactics away

My mind went blank. Then it spiraled.

I remember thinking, I’m the worst marketer in the world. This is so obvious. How did I not see this? What have I been doing?

The fear underneath wasn’t that I’d be replaced. It was that I’d be exposed. This was my first startup. I was wildly unqualified on paper. I wanted to be excellent so badly. And in that moment, it felt like I didn’t even understand the machine I was inside of.

It reminded me of being 17, moving from Africa to the U.S., arriving in Los Angeles with a confidence that dissolved almost immediately. I thought I understood the world. Then suddenly I didn’t even understand what people were talking about half the time. Overconfidence turning into insecurity overnight.

Sitting there, my body reacted before my brain caught up. Tight chest. Heat. That sinking feeling of realizing you’ve been measuring the wrong thing.

When insecurity turned into clarity

And then something else happened. A brain blast of excitement.

Because suddenly I could see the pattern behind the work.

The investor started sketching the levers.

→ Increase efficiency - fixing the leaks in the bucket like conversion rates, win rates, churn.

→ Increase value per customer through higher ACV and expansion.

→ Expand top of funnel in existing segments.

→ Expand top of funnel in new segments.

It wasn’t perfect. It didn’t have to be. What it gave me was a why.

Up until then, I had been celebrating effort. Hours. Output. Velocity. The grind itself.

The day I learned that work without leverage is just motion

It doesn’t matter that you drove to the office at 5 a.m. for months straight. It doesn’t matter that you shipped harder than everyone else.

If the work isn’t moving the levers that matter, it’s just work with no leverage.

There are infinite things you could be doing at any given moment. The important part isn’t the list. It’s the choosing.

That meeting permanently broke tactics-first planning for me, because tactics-first planning is how you lose your mind.

Marketing is public. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has an idea. If you’re in reactive mode - trying to execute on all of them, trying to keep everyone happy - you end up working twelve-hour days with nothing to show for it except exhaustion.

Planning stopped being about pleasing everyone and started being about choosing

Planning with leverage shifted the power dynamic.

Suddenly planning wasn’t about filling weeks or proving usefulness. It was about alignment. About creating the plan together. About agreeing on what success actually looked like. Not being an idea-shipping machine.

If we’d kept planning the old way, we would’ve done hundreds of meaningless things instead of a few meaningful ones, plugging holes instead of building a house.

After that, planning started to feel different in my body. Less frantic. More curious.

Frameworks like this didn’t require me to have all the answers. They gave me better questions to ask.

The first time planning gave me power instead of anxiety

The next time I sat down to plan alone, I didn’t open a giant spreadsheet of everything we could do. Every time you start there, someone will inevitably say “well, we have to do all of it.”

Instead, I started with impact.

I stopped measuring the value of work by how impressive it sounded or who it would make happy. I stopped executing without thinking.

My posture in the room changed.

I realized it wasn’t my job to disappear into the basement and come back with a magical plan. My job was to ask the right questions.

Ironically, that put me in a position of power.

Why levers weren’t enough once the team started growing

As the company grew, something else emerged naturally from that original insight.

Levers answered the why, but we still needed a way to tell a story about the how.

That’s where growth engines came in.

→ Inbound.

→ Outbound.

→ Ecosystem - partners, community, user flywheels.

→ Events.

→ Product virality.

→ Lifecycle and conversion optimization.

Ideas didn’t just map to levers anymore. They lived inside engines.

Not lever one plus 27 tactics, but a clear narrative about which machines we were building and tending.

This mattered even more as the team grew.

Ownership of an engine isn’t just operational clarity. It’s psychological clarity. When someone owns an engine, they know what success looks like. They know where to focus. They stop thrashing.

The sentence I wish I’d heard in that room

That original version of me in the stained-carpet room was trying so hard to prove she belonged by doing everything.

If I could freeze her in that moment and say one sentence, it would be this:

You weren’t hired to answer all your emails.

You were hired to make an impact.

Planning with a soul isn’t about abandoning rigor. It’s about remembering that leverage is the point.

And sanity is the reward.

It was 10am on a Thursday when I found myself on a four hour walk across the Venetian Islands in Miami. Contractors were trimming giant hedges along the road, leaf blowers humming in the background like a reminder that the world was still producing, still moving.

And then there was me.

Doing nothing. Producing nothing. Just putting one foot in front of the other because it was the only thing I could bring myself to do.

Miami was glistening. Blue water, perfect sun, palm trees, waterfront villas. Paradise all around me, hell inside my mind. My body was in full fight mode, gripping onto the identity I had just stepped out of - CMO of an $850M company, operator of a team of marketers serving a global organization.

I had willingly left it. I had chosen to take time off. But when I stepped into that time off, time swallowed me whole.

Because without the title, the meetings, the decisions, the calendar blocks, the production machine humming around me, I was confronted by a truth I had never faced so nakedly:

My entire identity had been built on producing.

I thought I had to earn every hour of my life.

As I walked, thoughts surged through me like tiny electrical shocks.

I needed to launch my newsletter.

I needed to post on LinkedIn.

I needed to text people back.

I needed to clean the closet.

I needed a better diet.

I needed a better routine.

I needed to move the furniture around.

I needed to earn the right to live that day.

It felt like I was on an invisible clock, where before the clock struck the top of each hour, I needed to justify the next one. But I wasn’t doing any of it. I was paralyzed. The to do list kept rolling over to the next day and the next, like a tide I couldn’t fight.

People talk about the emptiness that hits after crossing a peak - selling a company, finishing a marathon, hitting a big goal. But it’s not an elegant spacious emptiness. It’s a tidal wave that asks, without compassion or warning:

What is your purpose now?

So I kept walking. Somewhere deep down I knew I needed to let it all come up. I told myself I would walk until I was empty. And I did.

Purpose isn’t something you’re given. It’s something you answer.

I was in the middle of reading two books at the time.

The first was Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I had read it years before, but it landed differently this time. There was a passage I couldn’t shake:

“We had to learn ourselves, and teach the despairing men, that it did not matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

Frankl wrote this in Auschwitz…starved, humiliated, everything stripped down to nothing. The only freedom he had left was the freedom to turn his suffering into meaning.

The argument he makes is that sitting around asking life for answers is not how meaning works.

So there I was, walking past multimillion-dollar homes in perfect sunshine, asking all the wrong questions. Asking life: what do you have for me? Asking for direction. Asking for clarity. Asking for something outside me to fill the emptiness.

It’s a subtle shift, perhaps - but instead of looking outward for meaning, it’s looking inward.

I’m not asking, I’m answering. And there’s a sense of agency in that.

The second book was Mastery by Robert Greene, which triggered me into a deeper spiral.

“You are committed to your Life’s Task, to giving it full expression. It is up to you to find it and guide it correctly. You are on your own.”

Was I on the path I was meant to be on?

Did I even know what my Life’s Task was anymore?

Had I confused the momentum of success with the meaning of purpose?

The pressure to use this sabbatical to find my “calling” felt crushing. I had imagined a tidy, beautiful process of self-discovery.

Instead, it was hell.

Letting go felt like giving up, but it was the first moment of freedom.

The shift happened quietly, about halfway across the Venetian bridge. The city was strangely silent. Cruise ships towered above me, the skyline framing puffy clouds. But the air was still.

Every time one of those urgent thoughts surfaced - “you should be doing this,” “you need to be catching up,” “you’re falling behind,” “you’re wasting time,” “you’re useless” - I just kind of shrugged and let it go. I told myself all I needed to do was put one foot in front of the other.

With every step, I felt a tiny sliver of space open up. A small internal unclenching.

It felt a little like giving up, but it wasn’t. It was the first moment where I could see my thoughts, almost from above, instead of being ruled by them.

With each step, I started to see the pattern from the outside instead of drowning inside it. I saw how deeply I had internalized the industrial model of worth. The clock-driven model. The hours-equal-value model. The one that rewards output, not meaning.

I realized I didn’t want to live inside that system anymore.

What I wanted was to create something meaningful. To build systems that produced value without consuming my life. To stop measuring myself by how much I could grind through in a day and instead measure by what I could architect - what could endure, connect people, and compound without hollowing me out.

I didn’t want to be a piece of the engine.

I wanted to design systems that made space for humans - including myself.

Long ago I had declared war against idleness, and that was useful for a time. But that war was long over. I knew curiosity and connection would serve me better than fear in the future.

I’ve been a storyteller since I was a kid on a roof in Africa.

When I was a kid living in Africa, we weren’t allowed outside the gates of our house. The gate was tall and lined with outward-facing spikes. So I would climb on the roof with a notebook and write for hours.

When we traveled across the US for my parents’ nonprofit, my dad always let me speak into the microphone. At eight years old, my line was “the spiders there are as big as Daddy’s hand,” (which unfortunately was true), and it always made the crowd both laugh and understand a tiny slice of what our lives there were like.

At fourteen, I read an entire grammar book for fun.

And, I wrote a novel (every time I see my grandfather, he asks me “when are you going to publish your book?”).

Recently, reading Mastery, something clicked. Greene writes about paying attention to what you were naturally drawn to as a child - the things you’d do for hours without reward, without instruction, without an audience. He describes them as early clues to your life’s work.

Writing, speaking, storytelling…these weren’t hobbies. They were clues. And for years, I expressed them through marketing (which, in retrospect, makes perfect sense).

But the next chapter feels different. It feels like returning to something original. Something that belonged to me before it belonged to any company or any job.

Launching this newsletter wasn’t a strategy.

It was a homecoming.

I dare say it might be part of my Life’s Task, part of my answer to meaning. Part of me knew that at eight and at fourteen.

We don’t win by being machines. We have machines for that now.

In the weeks that followed, things did not suddenly become neat or peaceful. I still had moments of panic. I still battled the voice that told me I was useless. But I understood something new: I could make meaning out of this unraveling.

For the first time, I understood I was rewiring a way of operating that not only no longer served me, but no longer fits the world we’re entering.

We have AI for the robot work.

We don’t win by being machines.

We win by being unmistakably human.

Meaning makers. Builders of engines that scale our time, not consume it. Creators of connection, using our intuition and uniqueness.

This realization is shaping how I think about my next chapter.

One of the reasons I left Kandji (after 6+ years I’m immensely proud of) was the desire to build from the ground up at an early stage company in a new era. An AI era. A leverage era. A meaning era.

The companies that win now will be built by people who know how to create engines, not fill them. People who think in leverage, not tasks. Leaders who build real connection, not endless to do lists.

The mindset shift I fought on that bridge - the one that felt like death - is the exact shift this new era demands.

It’s no longer: How much did you produce today?

It’s becoming: What meaning did you create today?

My identity is no longer something I trade my life for.

What remains after stepping out of a title is what was real all along.

My worth is not based on my work.

My identity is not the sum of my output.

My value is not my inbox, or my calendar, or the size of my team.

My life is not a production schedule.

I want to create from the depth of who I am, to trust my intuition, and to find meaning in my life.

I want to make choices that my eighty-year-old self would look back on with peace.

And none of that requires being a machine.

There is no final answer. Only the act of answering.

When I picture myself back on that bridge now - the sun on the water, the stillness in the air, the world working all around me - I see something I didn’t see then:

My job isn’t to wait for life to tell me its meaning. My job is to answer the question life asks me, day after day. Not with certainty or perfection. But with movement. One foot in front of the other.

There is no final answer.

There is only answering.

And somewhere between the water and the sky, I took the first step.

Several years ago, it was two weeks into my role as the first marketing hire.

I found myself in a small conference room with the head of sales. We had zero customers. No public launch. A product that was close, but not fully ready. Engineers moved quietly on the other side of a glass wall, finishing the last features before we could open the doors wide to the world.

Inside the room it was sterile. White walls, no warmth, and no plants because the office was brand new. I was at the whiteboard, marker in hand, mapping out the customer lifecycle stages in HubSpot as if an entire engine of leads was rushing toward us and the only bottleneck was my brilliance.

He sat at the table, one hand propping up his head, eyes blank.

I kept writing. Contact. MQL. SQL. Opportunity. Customer. Each stage felt like evidence that I knew the playbooks, that I had mastered the craft of bringing order to chaos. I imagined he would see my diagram and feel relieved that someone finally understood how to build this engine.

Then he asked a single question.

Why are we doing this now?

My heart fell to my feet. The marker froze in my hand. I went from feeling like the best marketer in the world to the worst one. The first flash of emotion was anger. How could he not see how brilliant this was. How could he not see that I was building something important?

The second flash was truth. At the time, we didn’t have customers. We barely had leads. We didn’t even have a website that reflected what we did. Nothing I was writing on that whiteboard mattered yet. I had walked in determined to impress him with my playbook, and instead I was performing a framework for a business that did not exist yet.

In that room, a belief died. The belief that being a great first marketer meant knowing the playbooks.

What I eventually learned is that proximity to the buyer matters more than any framework you walk in with. Understanding the founder’s vision matters more than the order of operations.

And that in the first 90 days, your job isn’t to build an engine. It’s to create the problem that the engine will eventually solve.

If I could relive that moment, here is what I would do differently.

I would put the marker down.

And I would walk out of that conference room.

Why “negative capability” is the source of your spark

I’m reading “Mastery” by Robert Greene (highly recommend) and he writes that “we are by nature fearful and insecure creatures.” We don’t like what’s unfamiliar or unresolved. So when we step into new territory, a new role, a blank whiteboard, we reach for opinions and ideas that make us feel certain. Not because they’re right, but because they make us feel safe. “Many of these opinions do not come from our own deep reflection,” he says. They’re borrowed. And once we hold them, letting go feels like a wound to the ego.

Greene points to what John Keats called negative capability - “the ability to endure and even embrace mysteries and uncertainties.” He argues that it’s a source of creative power.

“The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces. To put Negative Capability into practice, you must develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path.”

Staying longer in that suspended state feels uncomfortable. Greene writes:

That’s where the spark comes from.

Don’t get me wrong - I’d still ship something useful on day 1. But I wouldn’t try to put everything into neat and tidy marketing-strategy lifecycle-stage boxes just yet.

Here’s how I would do it:

The first thing I’d do: immersion (proximity, not playbooks)

In the version of this story I wish I’d lived, I walk straight to the head of sales’ desk (or Zoom room, or whatever). And, I flip the entire dynamic. I’m the one asking questions, not supplying answers. They’re the one at the whiteboard.

I tell them I’m here to understand their world and help remove friction. Then I ask about the conversations that went well and the ones that went sideways, the deals that should have closed but didn’t, the objections that show up again and again, and the patterns they’ve seen that never make it into a report.

I listen without interrupting. I don’t try to add my own insights or show that I’ve solved something similar before. I make space for their expertise. I ask for one tactical thing that, if I fixed it quickly, would show I’m here to make their job easier. And then I ship it. Not perfectly. Not after three brainstorms. Immediately.

A small win to make clear that I am here to help, not to theorize.

Then I go back to my desk and turn into a detective. A borderline stalker of the ICP.

I spend hours in Reddit threads and community forums, collecting the raw, unfiltered language our ICP uses when no one is watching. I look for emotional signals. Frustration. Delight. Confusion. Hesitation. Anything that reveals what actually matters to them.

If we have recorded calls, I listen to them on a walk or during my commute. I start to notice patterns in tone, not just content. The moments when someone’s energy drops. The moment they lean in. I write down the exact words people use to describe their problems. After a while, a picture starts to form.

Not a persona, but a human. Proximity, not playbooks.

Curiosity, not construction. The groundwork for everything else.

The second thing I’d do: capture the manifesto

At some point in the first or second week, I’d walk to the founder’s desk and ask when they have 30 minutes for something important. I wouldn’t bring a deck. I wouldn’t bring a proposal. I’d tell them I want to write the origin story of the company in the form of a manifesto that never has to be published. Maybe eventually it could be more, but for now, it’s just for us.

That always lowers the temperature. People speak more clearly when the pressure to perform is removed. I’d sit across from them with a list of questions and a quiet mind. No interruptions. No filling in their sentences. No trying to translate their thoughts into positioning before they finish speaking.

I’d ask until I understood the problem they fell in love with.

The moment they realized the world was broken, the change they wanted to see, and the legacy behavior they wanted to replace.

This is where the emotional spine of the company comes from. Not the website. Not the sales deck. Not the features. The manifesto becomes the internal compass that quietly guides the team’s decisions long before the outside world sees it.

The third thing I’d do: write the messaging

There’s always a morning when the fog clears.

A moment when the immersion insights and the founder’s vision sit in your hands at the same time, and you finally feel like you’re no longer guessing. That’s when I’d start the messaging doc.

I imagine it early in the day, coffee steaming beside me, the office still quiet. I’d surround myself with inputs. Quotes from prospects, threads from Reddit, fragments of the manifesto, notes from sales calls. All the raw material that shows me how buyers speak and how the founder thinks. It’s like being a translator between two worlds.

AI would help me form the first draft, but I would push it with hard questions. Would this resonate with someone who has no context? Is this true to the founder’s voice? Does it sound like the buyer? Is it specific enough to matter? Is it simple enough to remember?

What comes out isn’t just messaging. It’s the first real articulation of what we believe, who we serve, and why any of this deserves to exist. It’s the foundation for the website, the sales deck, the onboarding experience, and even the product roadmap.

The backbone for the growth engine: building the levers & tactics as I go

This is where I start executing. Throughout the entire ninety days, I would keep a running document open. My levers and tactics list.

A single place to store every growth idea that emerges from conversations, research, and late-night thinking.

The best ideas show up when I’m not looking for them.

After a call with sales, I’d jot down the stray growth idea that showed up in the last thirty seconds. After a user interview, I’d note that crazy partnership idea I had. If a content idea hit me during a walk or right before bed, it would go in the list before it faded. Some ideas would be small. Some would be weird. Some would feel useless in the moment. But they all belong there.

But instead of running on ideas, I’d tie each one to a growth lever, which could look something like:

Grow awareness.

Create demand.

Improve conversion.

Accelerate sales cycles.

Increase ACV.

Expand existing customers.

Reduce churn.

Open a new market.

This is how you avoid becoming the marketer who is always busy but never driving the business forward. Ideas are abundant. Leverage is rare. And, prioritization is hard.

This way you can prioritize the ideas that are moving the right levers at the right time, and solving the problems in the right order (for example, creating demand creates the “problem” of having to improve conversion). I have wasted a lot of time solving problems that don’t exist yet.

This list would evolve all ninety days, and keep evolving forever. And it would help me execute with intention (and become the backbone of the next ninety, and the next, and the next).

What these ninety days really are: creating the right problems

I keep coming back to a quote by Jensen Huang that puts all of this into plain language:

That’s “negative capability” in practice. Not brilliance or speed, but the willingness to stay with something when it’s unclear, uncomfortable, and unresolved, trusting that clarity comes to those who don’t rush past the hard parts.

The first 90 days are not a playbook, or a checklist, or a perfectly ordered sequence of tasks.

They’re a series of lived moments that create the right problems in the right order.

Problems that emerge naturally from being close to the buyer and close to the founder’s vision (for example, understanding the vision and buyer so deeply creates the problem of how to bring that vision to that buyer).

Problems that generate momentum for the company instead of structure for its own sake (for example, creating demand then creates the problem of optimizing for conversions).

If I could redo those first ninety days, I wouldn’t start with the whiteboard.

I wouldn’t start with lifecycle stages or funnels or automation. I would start with immersion. With curiosity. With listening not just with my head, but with my whole being.

And when you can stay there long enough to understand the buyer and the vision deeply enough, the strategy writes itself.

It was my first day at my first startup.

We were about twelve people, crammed into a tiny LA office. I was 22, maybe 23 years old. This was my first startup job and I was the first marketing hire they’d ever had.

No one to delegate to. No one to ask. Just me, sitting in the middle of the sales pit, surrounded by AEs and SDRs making calls, trying to look like I belonged.

I remember getting ready that morning, stressed about looking the part. I’d bought a new outfit hoping that if I looked right, maybe they’d think I was a real marketing leader. I wanted them to believe I knew what I was doing.

Then one of the reps turned to me and said, “So… what’s marketing? What are you going to do?”

That’s when the panic hit.

I had no idea.

I smiled and said something like, “It’s a little bit of math and a little bit of magic.” But my brain was screaming at me. I could tell they all thought at best that marketing was this mysterious force and at worst that it was arts and crafts.

I knew it was about driving pipeline and building brand awareness, but I didn’t know how to explain how that was going to help them do their jobs.

Looking back, a better answer would have been: I’m here to make your job easier. I’m going to build the brand so you have more leads to work. And when someone knows our name and trusts us, it’ll help you at every step. Higher response rates. More closed deals.

But I didn’t know how to say that yet.

I sat there doing some onboarding tasks while the reps filed in and got into the flow of their day. They had a rhythm. I had nothing. No framework for thinking about my impact. No plan. Just some tactics I’d used at my last company and no idea if they’d work here.

I remember walking out that day wondering if I’d made a huge mistake. Maybe my last job was just a fluke.

I’d wanted this job so badly. In my interview, they told me I was the youngest and least experienced candidate they were considering. They hired me anyway. It felt amazing that they were taking a bet on me, but it also felt intimidating. I was already afraid I’d let them down.

Marketing is misunderstood, and it’s your job to solve that

That feeling of sitting in a crowded room and realizing no one understands what you do doesn’t go away just because you get more senior.

Years later, as a CMO at a company with hundreds of people, I saw a strategy meeting disappear from my calendar. Then I noticed it was still happening, just without me.

I sat on the bathroom floor crying, convinced I’d failed to say anything useful in the last hundred meetings. That I didn’t deserve to be in the room anymore.

Different office, same ache.

The loneliness of being a marketer isn’t about being alone. It’s about being misunderstood. And here’s the thing: no one is going to fix that for you.

Marketing is about bringing things to market. Not just your product, but your culture, your people, your ideas. That means it needs to be interwoven with everything inside the company. And that means the people need to be interwoven too.

If you have people on the journey with you, the external marketing becomes a reflection of everything inside. It gets people bought in. Internal marketing is at least as important as external marketing.

Build in public, starting inside your own building

The only way I got out of that alone zone was by being proactive about connection.

I started running marketing brainstorms with leadership.

Ops, sales, CS. We’d begin by aligning on the levers we wanted to move most: churn, win rates with certain deal types, average deal size. Then I’d bring a menu of ideas for how marketing could help move each one.

That simple shift changed everything. When people contribute to the story, they believe in it.

I started working directly with sales and customer success.

Not through dashboards, but side by side. I’d fly out for an event in a rep’s territory, run the campaign together, follow up on every lead as a team. I’d go to them and say, “We have this budget to help you. What do you want to do?” Then I’d offer a menu of ideas to spark thinking.

Suddenly I wasn’t the marketing person anymore. I was a partner helping make deals happen.

I found mentors and peers.

Early on, I had a call with a CMO who was advising our company. I walked her through everything I was doing, half expecting her to tell me I was way off track.

She said, “You’re doing all the right things.”

One sentence. Suddenly everything felt clear again.

That’s when I realized how few people inside a company will ever say that to you. They don’t understand marketing deeply enough to recognize good from great. You need people who do: other marketers, advisors, communities like Exit Five or CMO Coffee Talk.

Know your customer means knowing your internal customers too

If you’re the first marketer, the real work isn’t just building campaigns. It’s building understanding.

You’re teaching your company what marketing actually is, why it matters, and how it helps them win. You’re telling a story about your work that makes people want to be part of it.

Here’s where to start:

Run a brainstorm with leadership.

Bring ops, sales, and CS together. Ask, “Which levers matter most this quarter?” Then show how marketing can help move them. Make it a shared mission, not a marketing project.

Partner one on one with sales.

Sit in on calls. Shadow demos. Run a campaign together. Show up with budget or resources in hand and ask what they need. It makes collaboration real.

Join a community.

The validation and insight you need won’t come from inside your company. Find your people outside.

Get a mentor.

Schedule a call with someone a few steps ahead. Walk them through your plan. Sometimes one sentence from someone who’s been there changes everything.

Storytelling is everything

If I could go back to that twenty-two year old sitting in the sales pit in her new outfit, I’d tell her two things.

First: storytelling is everything. You can have all the data and tactics in the world, but if you can’t tell a clear story about what you’re doing, no one will follow you. Pick one story about why you’re there. Repeat it until everyone around you can repeat it back.

The story you tell about your work sometimes matters more than the work itself. Make it a mantra.

Second: it’s OK to feel alone, but don’t let it stay that way. I spent so much time working harder to prove myself instead of having open, vulnerable conversations. But talking about what’s not working and working together on what you can do about it actually makes people trust you more.

You’re not there to have all the answers. If you pretend to, you’re probably missing something. Don’t go into the basement to come up with the perfect strategy and surprise everyone with the right answers. It doesn’t work that way.

The answers are in the room. You just have to be open enough to find them. People will tell you what they need. You just have to listen.

Why this matters

Zero to one is lonely work. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

You can tell the story. You can build your people. You can make the noise that reminds everyone, including yourself, why you’re there.

No one is coming to save you. But that’s also the freedom: you get to decide how to show up.

I was great at logistics. Terrible at story.

I was huddled around a conference room table somewhere in San Francisco with my marketing team for quarterly planning.

Someone on the team had given me feedback that instead of jumping straight into planning, we should carve out some time to reflect on the previous quarter. What went well and what didn’t go well.

Why is it always so hard to do this? It felt almost painful to carve out some of the “valuable planning time” for reflection. But it ended up being one of the most transformative moments on the team.

I knew we had a big campaign to run that quarter and it felt exciting to know that we had something big on deck. I was always looking at the marketing team from an ops perspective, always trying to solve things by machining them.

Then she said it: “We’re really great at planning out all the logistics of the campaign, but we’re not great at nailing the story. What’s the big campaign story? We just get straight into logistics without knowing what that is.”

That hit so hard.

It hit hard because I realized there was a big hole where a galvanizing narrative should be. But also because it made me see a big hole in me as a leader. I felt like it was my responsibility to know the story.

The first marketer has to build what isn’t there

As the first marketing hire, you have to establish the story. You usually don’t have anything to work off of. You have to build it. Plant the flag in the ground.

Most of us have worked at places where the story was someone else’s job, where the brand team or the strategy team or someone more senior had already done this work.

What I learned is that as the first marketer, that falls on me.

Even as a second time first marketing hire, or third, or even at a large company, you can fall into this trap, just like I did. The narrative that should tie everything together isn’t there.

A confused prospect call. A sales rep who can’t explain what makes you different. A new hire who struggles to describe what the company does. A campaign that feels flat because it’s not anchored to anything bigger.

You’ll get these signals, these reminders, that your story isn’t there.

In that moment around the conference table, I told her the truth. “Yeah, you’re so right.” And I immediately saw how it made the campaigns feel lifeless. Like I was a robot going through the motions instead of creating something alive.

My big learning in recent years is that if you don’t have a story to tell, you have nothing. You can have the most well oiled marketing machine in history and you will still fail.

When everyone tells a different story, there is no story

It felt like we were creating content that wasn’t pointing in any particular direction. It was random. We would latch onto whatever insight or product launch or topic we could find to write about, but it felt diffuse.

This was tied to a deeper problem. If you asked a group of people to write what the company does or what value it brings, you would get at least a hundred different answers. None of them well-articulated. The people who could answer best were our technical folks, but their answers were very technical and unclear. From a marketing perspective, everything revolved around channels and systems instead of the story.

This is so common at early stage startups. You start executing the logistics without knowing what story you have to tell. You often need to start shipping for the story to take form, but you should at least have a scrappy version of that story up front.

The founder has the vision in their head, but no one else can tell that story.

And this doesn’t just happen early stage. I see a lot of companies today going through massive transformation, often launching AI products to compete in the market. Their story has changed. The founder knows the new vision. But does everyone else? Or am I launching into logistics without knowing what story we’re telling?

A manifesto is fuel, not just brand

If I were the first marketer at a startup today, the first thing I’d build isn’t a campaign, a funnel, or even a deck.

I’d write a manifesto.

Not a positioning doc, not a pitch (though those will come next). A reason for being. The story behind the product. The change we believe in. The future we see coming. The beliefs we hold that others don’t. The legacy behaviors we’re here to replace.

When I’ve skipped this in the past, everything downstream lacked aliveness. No real theme, no connective tissue.

It’s not just brand. It’s fuel.

It drives what your team posts on LinkedIn, what the sales team says in their conversations, what your first designer chooses to visualize, what your website says and how it makes people feel, what features get prioritized in the product, what kind of people you attract and hire, what your early customers emotionally connect with, what your community rallies around.

You can’t outsource this.

AI can write helpful content. But it can’t tell your story. The manifesto is how your team learns to tell it together. It’s how you get the founder’s vision out of their head and into everyone’s.

The founder sees the future, the customer whisperer knows today

So how do you write one?

First, start with the founder.

They’re the ones who know the latest future vision as much as possible.

Then, find the “customer whisperers” internally.

Go to the people at the company who know the buyer better than anyone. Ideally they have two things: they talk to customers every day AND they’ve done the customers’ job before this job.

They’re extremely knowledgeable because they know how to do the customer’s job. They stand in their shoes. They understand it really well, but they also talk to people every day. If you can’t find both, find one or the other.

When I did this, I went to a couple of our product leaders who had been in our customers’ shoes in a past role. They weren’t lifetime Product folks. They were subject matter experts who had transitioned into product roles.

It’s helpful to get both the founder and the “customer whisperer” perspectives. The founder is often looking very far into the future. The customer whisperer is focused on words they can say and things they can show customers today that will resonate and function. You need to find the beautiful slice of togetherness (and tension) between both.

I asked them questions like:

1. What does the old world look like, the one where this company doesn’t exist?

2. What’s a commonly held belief in the industry that you disagree with?

3. What are the big questions we’ve been asking ourselves while building this?

4. What does the future look like ten years from now?

5. In that future, how are the companies who understand this change winning?

6. How are the ones who ignore it falling behind?

7. And most importantly: what’s the promised land? If someone fully embraces this belief and succeeds, what does that make possible for them? How does it make them feel, act, and show up in the world?

The goal was to pull out their unique perspective. Not just a generic “what we believe in” but “what are the parts of what we believe in that are different”? And why it all matters.

When we did this exercise, the team was relatively small. We were all in the room. That was powerful. We didn’t even need to take the interview and turn it into a fancy document. The team already understood the patterns. They saw them clearly.

But we did take them and pulled them into a handful of clear themes in a simple document that we shared around. It was fuel for our brand. Fuel for our content, our campaigns, our email copy, our website, our product launch positioning, our social copy. All of it.

Clarity for the calendar, purpose for the team

There were two results I observed doing this exercise. One is really tactical and one is a little more deep and human.

The first was clarity.

Our content calendar was immediately clear. Our events calendar was obvious. Our social posting strategy was clear. Our campaign calendar was clear. It made everything clear.

That gave us some very clear trends to work with in terms of our writing and really brought some aliveness and some topics we could bite into. We found ourselves, even months later, remembering a theme or a line or a word that was used in those interviews that gave us the right angle on what messaging to put out into the world.

The second was a sense of purpose on the team.

The mission wasn’t just in the founder’s head anymore. I knew what we were showing up to do. I think we drastically underestimate how much a strong mission can be fuel for a motivated team to do their best work. And to feel like we’re building something together. There’s a sense of togetherness in the fact that we’re building for a shared mission instead of just “executing on logistics” in our silo without seeing how it’s connected to the greater whole.

Interview, validate, test, roll out

So, if you want to get to this place, here’s what you can do:

1. Ask your team how they view your mission. Are you getting vastly different answers from everyone?

2. Interview the founder.

3. Interview the customer whisperers.

4. Pull both perspectives together into a manifesto.

5. Meet one on one with the customer whisperers and show them your manifesto. Does it land?

6. Meet one on one with key influential folks in the company and show it to them. Does it land?

7. Test it somehow. A couple of ads, a couple of social posts, a couple of customer calls. Does it land?

8. Validate with the founder that it reflects their vision.

9. Roll it out to everyone.
   

If you’re sitting in that campaign planning meeting feeling like robots going through the motions, or up at 11pm wondering what to say on that prospect call tomorrow, or sitting in front of a blank page wondering how to describe what your company does, or feeling that fuzzy lack of clarity on what to do, know that there’s clarity to be found. It all starts with asking deeper questions, getting to the root of the why.

A story isn’t what you say. It’s what everyone believes together.

When I look back on that moment, that simple question from a teammate, it taught me something I wish I’d learned sooner.

It started with a single LinkedIn post.

I wrote about the 9 things I would do differently if I were the first marketer all over again (after having been the first marketer at two companies now worth over $2 billion).

I shared how I would go from zero to one with less guesswork and more leverage. I hit publish and went for a run. By the time I got back, the post had taken on a life of its own: nearly four hundred comments, founders tagging their teams, first-time marketers asking for playbooks, people adding their own hot takes of what they would add to the list.

That response was the signal.

A few weeks later, Pavilion invited me to speak at their national conference on the same topic. Preparing for that talk made me realize something important. If I believe in these nine principles, the best way to share them is to live them.

My next zero is this newsletter.

This post is both a launch and a case study in how I bring each principle to life. Rather than only list the ideas, I am showing how I applied every one to create The Zero to One Marketer.

1. Know your customer so well the strategy writes itself

What it is

I used to sit on every sales call and write every piece of copy. That proximity helped me hear what customers cared about, what words they used, where they hung out. Be close enough to “hear the music,” and messaging & growth channels become obvious.

The best strategy emerges when you understand the buyer so completely that your next move feels obvious.

I see a lot of marketers use AI to accelerate outdated playbooks (more blogs, more automated emails, etc.) when the real opportunity is using AI to listen, or to do something different.

I shared the story of our Marketing Shark Tank, where my team pitched wild ideas to “sharks,” internal folks who represented our buyer personas in character. A transformational use of AI was a requirement for every pitch. We brought ideas to the table like:

• Digital twins of our buyer personas to bring lived experience to life

• Social sparks: authentic, hilarious, and engineered to spread

• Interactive web experiences: from snarky avatars to surprisingly useful tools

• Out-of-home & conference stunts that would terrify traditionalists

• An insights engine powering everything from PR hooks to QBRs

• (and many more)

The idea wasn’t just a lot of fun, but the power of it was that having the “sharks” represent our buyer personas allowed us to measure those ideas based on what would land with our buyer. At the end of the day, who cares what I think or what the executive team thinks? What matters is what our buyer thinks.

How I am applying it here

The original LinkedIn post was more than a fun spike in engagement. It was proof of demand. I used AI tools to analyze all four hundred comments. Here is what surfaced:

• “Build brand as a scalable system” came up 22 times. People loved the idea of a modular design system and a single messaging document that AI can pull from.

• “Know your customer so well the strategy writes itself” was not the most common phrase, but those comments were the longest and most detailed.

• More than half of the commenters were founders rather than marketers and they were the most enthusiastic, tagging their teams and asking follow up questions.

Clearly there is a hunger for real, structured guidance on what to do in the early days, especially for first marketers, founders, and early GTM hires. That insight shaped everything about this newsletter. The audience is not only marketers. It is anyone trying to create something new.

At Pavilion, I opened my talk with an AI bot trained on my notes and invited the audience to feed it questions throughout the talk. Their questions will guide what I write next.

2. Start with brand as a scalable system

What it is

Build a modular design system early with components you can combine instead of create. A Figma system, Canva templates, Google Slide layouts. Pair that with a messaging doc, your “copy-paste” bank of positioning, beliefs, and product language. It becomes a foundation for consistency and a knowledge base for AI.

Curating beats creating. A brand is not a single campaign or a PDF of guidelines; it is a living system that grows. It’s a system of components that you curate into your next creation, instead of creating everything from scratch. And, consistency builds trust.

At the talk, I shared how a strong brand begins with a manifesto: the beliefs you hold, the old world you are replacing, the promised land you invite others into.

Motion video can crystallize that system: once you see your brand alive in motion you can pull every frame into decks, sites, and social. A brand with reusable shapes, repeatable motion, and an unmistakable narrative becomes magnetic (and consistent).

How I am applying it here

I wanted the visuals to feel like me: black and white, clean, timeless. I only wear black and white and it has become something people remember (plus, my closet looks like a showroom, packing for travel is easy, I could go on…).

The origami theme came naturally. Going from zero to one is like starting with a blank sheet of paper. It can become something intricate and beautiful or end up in a crumpled heap. Each post will feature an origami object tied to the topic so the design language is systematic and expandable.

The giraffe is personal. I grew up in Africa and spent weekends as a teenager chasing giraffes on motorcycles. Zero to one is that mix of adventure and risk.

I named the newsletter Zero to One Marketer because it reflects my entire career journey: from first marketing hire to CMO, reinventing myself many times over along the way.

3. Create the problem

What it is

Don’t build the whole funnel on day one. If you don’t have traffic, don’t worry about conversion. Solve the problem you actually have. Let the next one emerge or you’ll be building and rebuilding as things inevitably change.

Ship before you have every answer. I have made the mistake of building complex HubSpot workflows and conversion funnels long before we had traffic, only to rebuild them five times. You create the problem first…drive traffic so you earn the problem of conversion, generate leads so you earn the problem of follow-up.

Real data will rewrite your assumptions anyway.

How I am applying it here

Instead of perfecting every detail, I set a deadline to launch this thing: the Pavilion talk. I am writing this from a hotel lobby in DC the night before. Nothing like a real deadline to force a launch. I do not have every future post mapped out. I simply needed to get the first one live and have lightweight systems for how the rest will follow.

4. Prioritize the 95 percent, not just the 5 percent

What it is

LinkedIn & search ads worked early, but only because we caught the 5% already in market. The “demand capture” pool dries up fast. Invest early in “demand creation.” Reach the 95% who aren’t ready yet, but will be.

Only 5% of any market is ready to buy now. The 95% are not, but they represent real growth.

In my talk, I called over-focusing on the in-market few “crack marketing,” something an old mentor used to tell me. Crack marketing can be summed up as: just keep juicing the pipeline machine with more budget so we can hit the next quarter.

We learned to separate pain points from buying triggers through deep buyer-journey research and surveys, and built content programs that meet the larger audience where they are long before they are ready to purchase.

How I am applying it here

This is not only for marketers who are “in the market” for marketing advice.

It is for anyone going zero to one: founders, early GTM hires, and anyone reinventing themselves. The welcome page names all of those groups on purpose.

Zero to one is bigger than just taking a startup from 0 to scale. Even at Series D, I have launched projects that felt like starting from scratch. I have reinvented myself as a leader more than once. The only constant is change. With AI rewriting so many rules, it feels like we are all back at zero, drawing up new plans and hunting for different ways to grow.

5. Build lightweight systems

What it is

You don’t need full-blown infrastructure. A Notion board or copy-paste doc can carry you farther than you think. Build systems for speed, not scale.

Complex approval chains slow teams to a crawl.

For larger teams, I have reorganized marketing into cross-functional squads, each with the skills and authority to ship in days instead of quarters.

For small teams, I would focus on hiring two archetypes: the Tastemaker, who knows what great looks like and listens deeply to customers, and the Operator, who builds the engine and automates everything possible. AI fits here as an amplifier, not the source of creativity.

How I am applying it here

One core system is that I will use LinkedIn to see what really resonates. The LinkedIn posts that really spark something will be the backbone of the articles I decide to write here, so I will never be staring at a blank page wondering what to cover.

In terms of efficiency, here is my process. For my LinkedIn posting today, I voice note a stream of thoughts into ChatGPT and have it structure a post. I then rewrite most of it so it sounds like me, but that first draft gets me 80% of the way. I will do the same for this Substack. I will take a LinkedIn post that worked well, add more depth with a longer voice memo, and then edit it into a deeper piece. I would love to better train AI to write exactly like me but I have not figured that out yet. This workflow keeps things moving.

6. Look bigger than you are

What it is

Design clean & consistent. Logo small (bigger companies don’t oversize their logo). Feature your biggest customers, your compliance certifications. Use big company channels but use them small (buy one billboard, get one great PR story, speak on one well-known podcast). Make big company content but do it small (like a single high production video).

B2B marketing is crowded and often…very boring. To stand out, you need courageous moves that create the perception of scale. I told the Pavilion audience about bold plays like a Times Square billboard for ten seconds just to capture photos and video you can share everywhere, or connected-TV ads that feel like a national campaign but run as low-cost retargeting. Original research and proprietary data also signal authority and attract press.

How I am applying it here

Since I started posting on LinkedIn three months ago, the response has blown me away. Having a dedicated newsletter adds to that momentum. A media site signals that this work is not a side project. It makes everything feel more established and creates leverage for future opportunities.

7. Protect your focus

What it is

Get used to working with an infinite backlog. I used to start each day with a sticky note on my laptop of my 3 to 5 most important tasks. You weren’t hired to do everything, you were hired to make impact.

The to-do list is infinite. I learned to treat it as an “infinite backlog,” pulling only the highest-impact items into a weekly sprint. I keep a daily sticky note of three to five tasks and send a Monday “top five” email to align with leadership.

I also plan by organizing marketing tactics into “levers” (demand, lead flow, ACV, win rate) to keep energy on what actually moves the business. Tactics are what you do, levers are why.

How I am applying it here

My lightweight systems will help me stay consistent, but the deeper discipline is how I use my time. I plan to pick a day and time to write and I will likely do it as a voice note while I am commuting or walking. Tying the work to something already on my calendar is habit stacking. It is a tactic I have used for years to keep big goals from falling apart.

8. Build in public

What it is

People trust people more than companies. Let internal voices share what they’re building and learning. In the AI era, content is easy. Opinion & stories are valuable.

Early or late stage, the fastest way to build credibility is to turn the company inside out. Share what is happening behind the scenes, let your team become the brand, and use channels that favor real voices.

I ignored LinkedIn for five years before posting consistently and grew from 4,000 to 15,000 followers in three months. This unlocked podcast invitations, live speaking opportunities, people reaching out to me for advisory help, invitations to private communities, and more.

How I am applying it here

I will share lessons learned and progress openly on LinkedIn and here. What is working, the impact it is having, what I am learning in real time. This Substack is both the product and the process. You will see the experiments, the pivots, and the wins as they happen.

9. Start community early

What it is

Create spaces where early customers can connect: Slack, Reddit, meetups, certification. It fuels your roadmap and scales support when customers can help each other. Even better if it creates user-generated content that is indexable/shareable.

The most scalable growth loops are built by community. From launching the first RevOps meetups in San Francisco to co-leading Pavilion Miami, I have seen how small gatherings spark powerful networks. People crave real connection and peer learning, especially when technology moves faster than any book or course. Community creates ecosystem marketing: customers, partners, and creators who build growth loops you could never fund alone.

How I am applying it here

Community has always been my growth engine. I am deeply involved in Dave Gerhardt’s Exit Five community and I co-lead the Pavilion Miami chapter. The next level will be creating more of a community around what has started on LinkedIn. Maybe it becomes something more formal, maybe it stays informal. For now I am happy to meet people where they already are and to build relationships one conversation at a time.

Why this matters

If you are a founder, an early GTM hire, or anyone staring down a fresh start, I hope these posts save you time and help you move faster.

Zero to one is messy. It is also the most fun you can have in business. This newsletter is my own zero to one in real time. Welcome to the beginning.