Marketing looked easier from the outside

Six reads on winning customers, leading teams and trying new tech.

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Don’t start with the oldest post. I was still figuring it out too.

Start with these ones

I’d begin with the first one. Otherwise, pick whichever sounds most like your week.

• Great meeting. No reply
  We had two good meetings and were already thinking about what to do with the money. Then we lost the tender. This is about the objections that surface after you’ve left, and what the person recommending you needs to be able to answer.

• Dear prince, acting like a founder can get you fired
  A month into a startup, the founder rejected a strategy I’d spent a week building. I had experience and a senior title. Apparently that didn’t make me a cofounder. I had some learning to do about challenging a decision without making every disagreement a fight over who was in charge.

• I set up a Claude subscription for my team
  The team had Claude and the brand guidelines. I still got a blog saying we were “quietly innovating”. It got me thinking about who checks the output, where the company keeps what it knows and how to improve the work without making one person approve everything.

• Trust doesn’t have a line item
  I wanted to remove an annoying security device from a savings account. Customers liked it because it made their money harder to spend. That was an awkward finding for someone who thought he was improving the product. Sometimes the thing you want to remove is doing a job you haven’t understood.

• Why people make work complicated to protect their jobs
  I watched a team spend months building dashboards with more than 200 metrics. The executives applauded. Nobody opened them again. Why complicated work can feel safer than simple work, and how managers encourage it without realising.

• My OpenClaw review
  I ran a personal AI agent for three months. It remembered what I was reading and recommended a film without being asked. It also invented a Liverpool fixture for three days running. I kept using it, but for different reasons than I’d expected.

I publish one full post a month, with shorter Notes in between.

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