Sam's Marketing Meditations

5 principles from Ogilvy

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 10:16:12 GMT

We’re back for part 2 of my unpacking the marketing, copywriting, + offers rabbithole I’ve gone down recently. (Here’s part 1 from last week in case you missed it)

As part of this rabbithole tour, I’ve been going through the classics: Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert, John Caples, etc. and have been filling up my notebook faster than ever before. Principles validated that we’ve been doing, foundational things I’ve found we’re drifting away from + need to come back to, and tactics that we hadn’t been using at all + put into our mix as soon as I finished reading the section.

After re-reading my highlights, I wanted to create some form of a lesson/takeaway that I could come back to as time goes on from each of these books. So today we have the second of these as I unpack my learnings + interpretations from “Confessions of an Advertising Man” by David Ogilvy.

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Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated surpassing its MQL targets while the business missed revenue. It’s for the marketers who want to be held accountable because they’re confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself. It’s for the marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.

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Culture

“Here is how I see our culture:

Some of our people spend their entire working lives in our agency. We do our damnedest to make it a nice place to work.

We treat our people like human beings. We help them when they are in trouble-with their jobs, with illness, with alcoholism, and so on.

We help them make the best of their talents, investing an awful lot of time and money in training-like a teaching hospital.

We give our executives an extraordinary degree of freedom and independence.

We like people with gentle manners.

We like people who are honest in argument, honest with clients and, above all, honest with consumers.

We admire people who work hard, who are objective and thorough.

We detest office politicians, toadies, bullies, and pompous asses. We abhor ruthlessness.

The way up our ladder is open to everybody. We are free from prejudice of any kind - religious prejudice, racial prejudice, or sexual prejudice.

We detest nepotism and every other form of favouritism. In promoting people to top jobs, we are influenced as much by their character as anything else.

The recommendations we make to our clients are the recommendations we would make if we owned their companies, without regard to our own interest.”

Real talk: it’s crazy to see how much things have changed in the 63 years since this was published.

How many companies actually help their employees when they’re sick or have health issues?
Have actual internal training programs to level up team members, not just a “learning stipend” to buy books or attend a conference once per year?
Operate with integrity in the sense of making recommendations that are what’s best for the client/customer, not necessarily for the company?

There are some out there that do exist, just one of those moments of reflection where seeing this on paper has you mentally going through the checklist of your current/former employers.

Clients/Customers

“I have never wanted to get an account so big that I could not afford to lose it. The day you do that, you commit yourself to living with fear.

Frightened agencies lose the courage to give candid advice; once you lose that you become a lackey.

…I also resign accounts when I lose confidence in the product. It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.”

A couple of interesting points made in here by Ogilvy + speak to the conviction he held when it came to their clients.

I’m sure most everyone reading this has at some point had a client or customer they couldn’t stand working with, but would justify the stress of them because of the income they provided.

The 1 huge client that paid so much they effectively controlled the product roadmap…
The 1 huge client that paid the same amount 2 clients combined did…but was actually the work of 3 to manage…

These are the things we need to evaluate when it comes to clients/customers. It’s not always a function of dollars to determine if they’re worth engaging/keeping, but how that also expands out to the mental bandwidth they occupy, the second-order decisions made because they overweigh business discussions, etc.

Then as a cherry on top, I loved that last part of the quote about resigning accounts when confidence is lost in the product. Goes back to integrity here + not being willing to market something you actively wouldn’t use or recommend to others.

Consumers

"The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her. Competing brands are becoming more and more alike.

When faced with the inconvenient fact that their brand is about the same as several others, most copywriters conclude that there is no point in telling the consumer what is common to all brands; so they confine themselves to some trivial point of difference. I hope that they will continue to make this mistake, because it enables us to pre-empt the truth for our clients."

Most of you have probably read/heard the first sentence of this quote somewhere before as it’s one of Ogilvy’s most famous. But it’s the second sentence that I think is the most important here as it’s something that still runs rampant today.

So many companies + brands lean on slogans and generalities and superlatives like “#1 in [category]” without ever providing any context or justification for those statements. It’s lazy marketing to do those + is why so many companies become commodities competing in a race to the bottom.

Consistency

“But never give up a campaign just because you have grown tired of it; housewives don’t see your advertisements as often as you do. The best thing is to get a great campaign, and then continue it for several years. The problem is to find a great campaign.

…You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who get married next year.”

If there’s one thing you remember from today’s newsletter, have it be this section. (and I say this because it’s what I need to continuously remind myself of)

Yes, frequency + ad fatigue are real, but I think we overindex on what the ad platforms recommend as “best practice” to the detriment of what’s actually working. For example, say you’ve got an ad that is absolutely KILLING it. I’ve seen marketers stop running it because it’s hit their frequency number that triggers a new ad/campaign to start running instead.

The unfortunate part of this is that the next ad/campaign are often for an entirely different product/feature, or is a different message/offer, so every bit of momentum gained from what was running WELL before is stripped out from underneath it.

And that’s why I love the simplicity + visual Ogilvy gives in the second part of the quote when he said, “You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.” That mental model is one that once I read it, have told myself I will come back to every month so I never forget it.

Congruence

“There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers. You might think that the public would resent this trick, but there is no evidence to suggest that they do.

…Always design your layout for the publication in which it will appear, and never approve it until you have seen how it looks when pasted into that publication. A layout must relate to the graphic climate of the newspaper or magazine which is to carry it.”

Since my Refine Labs days, I’ve always said the message NEEDS to match the medium it’s being placed on.

This is often the cause of so many “[channel] doesn’t work for us” claims we’d hear. Then when looking into why that channel wasn’t working, I’d see it was because they were taking something that was clearly formatted for a channel like LinkedIn and would take that exact same ad/content + push it over to a place like Reddit or YouTube.

Those channels operate ENTIRELY differently from one another in terms of how users consume + engage content, so it’s zero percent surprising that the “channel” didn’t work for them, when the reality was they were using the wrong medium/format within the channel.

Conclusion

Like I said last week, these principles work because they’re built on understanding human nature, not chasing the newest/shiniest trend. Ogilvy wrote this in 1963 (63 years ago!) and they’re still relevant. The mediums since then have changed (i.e. social ads vs. print), but the underlying fundamentals haven’t.

So that’s why I think going back to the classics matters. A lot of marketers are chasing silver bullets + trends that’ll only last for a few weeks/months, then it’s back to the drawing board to find the next one. There’s no consistency being built in how they’ll attract their market. The fundamentals in these classics prove there are other ways. If something’s been working for 63+ years, I’d be willing to bet it’ll probably continue to work for a few more years 😉

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. cool new feature in Substack that detects AI writing in publications. Here’s what this newsletter scored on the “AI slop” scale 😜

Claude Hopkins' 1.46% CTR principle

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 10:15:18 GMT

Over the past month I’ve been going down a copywriting + offers rabbithole. More specifically, the rabbithole around the timeless principles of doing this well, NOT some clickbaity form of “HoW tO cOpYwRiTe N gEt LeAdZ iN 2026” from someone who’s never actually sold anything other than those types of online courses…

Anyway, as part of this rabbithole tour, I’ve been going through the classics: Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert, John Caples, etc. and have been filling up my notebook faster than ever before. Principles validated that we’ve been doing, foundational things I’ve found we’re drifting away from + need to come back to, and tactics that we hadn’t been using at all + put into our mix as soon as I finished reading the section.

After re-reading my highlights, I wanted to create some form of a lesson/takeaway that I could come back to as time goes on from each of these books. So today we have the first of these as I unpack my learnings + interpretations from “My Life in Advertising & Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins.

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How to think about marketing

"When you once get a person's attention, then is the time to accomplish all you ever hope with him.

Bring all your good arguments to bear. Cover every phase of your subject. One fact appeals to some, one to another. Omit any one and a certain percentage will lose the fact which might convince.

People are not apt to read successive advertisements on any single line. No more than you read a news item twice, or a story.

In one reading of an advertisement one decides for or against a proposition. And that operates against a second reading.

So present to the reader, when once you get him, every important claim you have."

This is one that I realized I wasn’t doing a good job of.

I assumed the prospect reading the ad or hitting our landing page would be naturally curious enough to go to all the other relevant pages to learn all about our entire platform + the problems we could help them solve.

Nope.

This passage was the realization that many would only read what was put right in front of them + if that wasn’t compelling/insightful/helpful enough for them to go on reading, they’d leave. And while future ads would help bolster recall, they probably wouldn’t click/read anything since they already formed an opinion about us/our platform.

So after making sure the headline grabbed their attention + pulled them in, I drafted the supporting copy to round out the story AND then go on to speak to all the other outcomes that they desire.

Fun fact: CTR on this ad is 1.46% (avg LinkedIn ad CTR is 0.3%) + dwell time is 11.48 sec (avg LinkedIn ad has a 3.6 sec dwell time), so I think Hopkins was right on this one 😉

The power of show, don’t tell

"Mother made a silver polish. I molded it into cake form and wrapped it in pretty paper.

Then I went from house to house to sell it.

I found that I sold about one woman in ten by merely talking the polish at the door.

But when I could get into the pantry and demonstrate the polish, I sold to nearly all.

That taught me the rudiments of another lesson I never have forgotten. A good article is its own best salesman. It is uphill work to sell goods, in print or in person, without samples."

This was something I noticed early on for us. We were creating a new category, so no one really knew (or cared) what a “Talent Intelligence Platform” was.

But as soon as I started dropping in 30-90 sec use case videos showing the different jobs-to-be-done our ICP encounters every day + how easily our platform handled those, that was when the lightbulb went off for our prospects + we spurred a ton of inbound demos.

Saying things like “recruit faster!” or “get better candidates!” aren’t unique + don’t mean anything to a recruiter who gets bombarded daily with those types of promises. But showing them how that could be done + in a manner different from what they were used to - that was where the magic happened.

Storytelling + specificity

"I went to a brewing school to learn the science of brewing, but that helped me not at all.

Then I went through the brewery. I saw plate-glass rooms where beer was dripping over pipes...They showed me artesian wells, where they went 4,000 feet deep for pure water...They showed me the vats where beer was aged for six months before it went out to the user. They took me to their laboratory and showed me their original mother yeast cell.

I came back to the office amazed.

I said: 'Why don't you tell people these things? Why do you merely try to cry louder than others that your beer is pure? Why don't you tell the reasons?'

So I pictured in print those plate-glass rooms and every other factor in purity. I told a story common to all good brewers, but a story which had never been told. I gave purity a meaning.

Schlitz jumped from fifth place to neck-and-neck with first place in a very few months."

Building off of show, don’t tell, when you do need to tell, do so with specificity. That is what lends credibility + weight to what’s being said.

It’s super easy to say things like “trusted by thousands of recruiters!”, but an entirely different thing to say “used by 10,200 recruitment firms across 23 countries.”

But one thing I’m still working on doing for us is taking Hopkins’ storytelling approach above to walk a prospect through that specificity. Helping them see the knowledge, thought process, etc. that fuels the product they’d be using. Understanding what insights + data were found that illustrate how we aren’t just another piece of recruitment software, but how it was built + curated uniquely for them.

That’s where a believer is made.

What NOT to do

"One may gain attention by wearing a fool's cap. But he would ruin his selling prospects."

This is one I felt in my bones with the rise of AI slop + oversaturated feeds recently. It’s harder than ever to stand out + gain attention, so the “easy” solution to this is to put on a monkey costume + dance.

Yes, that’ll work - you’ll get eyes, but not all eyes are good eyes.

This can be taken literally in the sense that you could be capturing the attention of individuals who aren’t in your ICP, so that attention doesn’t ever turn into any business.

But it can also be eyes watching this type of marketing similar to how one watches a car crash happening in real-time - you want to look away, but you can’t…

And this then turns into a negative association with your brand/product. An impression/view occurred, but if all it did was turn off the prospect + even burn them from ever wanting to buy in the future, is that the type of attention/impression you really want to make?

Why it works

“Two men came to me, each offering me a horse. Both made equal claims. They were good horses, kind and gentle. A child could drive them.

One man said, 'Try the horse for a week. If my claims are not true, come back for your money.'

The other man also said, 'Try the horse for a week.' But he added, 'Come and pay me then.'

I naturally bought the second man's horse.'"

There’s something about subtle confidence that just works well.

More specifically, when it’s future-oriented. Like how the second man in this story said “Try the horse for a week. Come and pay me then.” as he knew that the individual would be happy + buy it.

So I tested something similar. Presented an offer where there’s zero downside for the prospect. They send us the role they’re trying to recruit for + we come to the demo with that already loaded into the system, qualified candidates + their contact info + an outreach sequence ready to be turned on to pull them into the candidate pipeline.

Whether the prospect goes on to continue the conversation + buy or not, all of the info is theirs to keep after, no strings attached.

From our data, we know the rate at which prospects convert when they get to see the platform in action + with relevant examples to them, so this is why we’re able to lead with that type of subtle confidence here + why the time put into this ahead of time will always net out positively for us as this scales.

Wrapping up

These principles work because they’re built on understanding human nature, not chasing the newest/shiniest trend. Hopkins wrote this in 1923 (103 years ago!) and they’re still relevant. The mediums since then have changed (i.e. social ads vs. print), but the underlying fundamentals haven’t.

So that’s why I think going back to the classics matters. A lot of marketers are chasing silver bullets + trends that’ll only last for a few weeks/months, then it’s back to the drawing board to find the next one. There’s no consistency being built in how they’ll attract their market. The fundamentals in these classics prove there are other ways. If something’s been working for 103+ years, I’d be willing to bet it’ll probably continue to work for a few more years 😉

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. cool new feature in Substack that detects AI writing in publications. Here’s what this newsletter scored on the “AI slop” scale 😜

Burnout, HRV, + why averages don't work

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 10:15:07 GMT

My HRV (heart rate variability) was nosediving from January to June. For those of you who don’t spend their free time geeking out on health research + data tracking, HRV is effectively a measure of your autonomic nervous system’s balance (AKA are you in fight or flight vs. rest + digest mode).

I was getting good sleep, had a consistent training program, + followed a generally healthy nutrition/dietary intake. But I was still tired at the end of the day.

The long story short of it ended up being a pretty “simple” answer: my autonomic nervous system was running almost perpetually in its sympathetic (read: fight or flight) state vs a more balanced mix of sympathetic + parasympathetic (read: rest and digest) state.

So in typical nerd fashion as I wanted to truly understand what was going on AND what I could do to turn things around, I got a bloodwork test, reviewed all my WHOOP data, and had a good old fashioned self-reflection to see if I could sort through what was going on.

A bit of a departure from my normal marketing/GTM articles, but I’m sharing this as it’s a trend I’m seeing/hearing from a number of friends + peers in the space - they’re burning out faster than ever + not sure what to do about it.

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A little context first

Lenny Rachitsky shared a report earlier this week that showed burnout is a much broader trend across the entire tech workforce than we may have realized as burnout jumped from 44.7% to 55.7% while career optimism dropped from 54.8% to 48.7% since he ran the same survey last year.

Link to Lenny’s study

The timing of this report came at a good time for me as it was right when I was in the middle of trying to sort out the chronic fatigue I was feeling + why my HRV/health metrics were declining despite putting more effort into improving them.

It was the “aha” moment when I recognized that I needed to approach this from both a physical and mental standpoint.

So like most of us today, I went over to Claude + started a conversation on this topic to help me work through things. And it didn’t pull any punches after dropping in all of the context in order to start synthesizing what it meant for me:

THE SYNTHESIS
The story is coherent and it’s almost entirely explained by one variable: chronic psychological stress.
HRV is the canary. It’s been declining since January — which tracks with when the burnout started intensifying based on what you’ve shared. The body is showing the cost of operating at high cognitive load in a depleting environment, even while you’re doing everything right on sleep, training frequency, and alcohol. The sleep data is holding because you’ve been disciplined about protecting it. But discipline has a cost too — you’re white-knuckling good habits in a difficult season, and that effort shows up in the HRV.

The question that almost led me down the wrong path

After reading the above, I did what anyone would do + asked a simple question back: “What can I do to help turn this around? I need behaviors + habits I can start implementing to improve this.”

And this is where Claude nearly led me wrong + why I will always be a proponent of never taking things at face value + choosing to think for yourself:

Highest leverage
The incline walk protocol you’ve already committed to is the single best thing on the list — but the mechanism matters. It only drives HRV improvement if you’re genuinely in Zone 2 for sustained periods. This is the physical intervention with the most direct parasympathetic upside.
Medium-high leverage
One genuinely low-effort addition: 5 minutes of slow, controlled breathing once per day — 5 second inhale, 5 second exhale — not as a meditation practice but as a physiological intervention. Resonance frequency breathing at that cadence has the most direct evidence base for HRV improvement of anything non-exercise related.
The one thing I’d push back on adding
More intensity in training right now. Your Zone 4 time doubled this period. That’s good for VO2 max long term but it’s additional sympathetic load on a system that’s already running hot. Don’t add more hard training sessions until HRV stabilizes. The incline walks are the right tool for this season specifically.

Being someone who always comes at things from a root-cause perspective, I recognized that while the incline walk + breathing exercises Claude recommended would technically help improve my HRV, that those were bandaids to the larger problem. They wouldn’t counter my sympathetic nervous system running in overdrive.

That’s the problem I needed to solve, not come up with a workaround to improve the HRV metric for the sake of improving it (sounds a bit like some other conversations we’ve had on here re: Goodhart’s Law, doesn’t it 😉).

So I pushed back. Said the incline walk would get zone 2 time up, but not counter the sympathetic overload. And then from personal reflection, I said I disagreed with the recommendation to avoid more intensity in training - that training intensity is my stress outlet and that walking/breathing exercises don’t quite get stress out the same way a hard run or heavy lifting session do.

And this is where the conversation really got interesting + the unlocks hit me hard:

The incline walk is a cardio tool, not a nervous system tool. Claude conflated these 2 which was a huge error. With my sympathetic system running hot from psychological load, the solve for this is parasympathetic activation, not aerobic base building.
A hard run/heavy lift, while highly stressing on my body, isn’t actually adding sympathetic load - it’s how I discharge it. It’s a fundamentally different physiological effect from chronic stress.

Jumping off of #2, I looked at my WHOOP data to see what it said when running an analysis through this lens. The finding was eye-opening to say the least:

High intensity workouts produce better next-day recovery than low intensity or rest
This is the most counterintuitive finding and directly validates your instinct about running. The day after a high intensity session your HRV averages 59 and recovery hits 72% — meaningfully better than low intensity (56 HRV, 66% recovery) or pure rest days (54 HRV, 66% recovery). Your nervous system responds well to hard output. It's discharging, not accumulating. This is a fast-twitch athlete pattern and it means you should protect the intensity in your training, not moderate it.

Fascinating.

My geek mode officially entered full force after this + I went down the rabbithole. To better understand this counterintuitive insight, I needed to better understand my personal dynamic between stress, workout intensity, stress discharge, and recovery.

TLDR on a hard workout comes down to what’s called “catecholamine discharge.” Long + short of it is chronic psychological stress means your body is continuously producing fight or flight hormones and never have the opportunity to clear out. A hard workout forces an acute catecholamine spike, which then crashes. This sounds scary/bad to hear your body is dumping the stress hormones hard and fast, but it’s actually working in my favor as my parasympathetic system swings hard in the other direction to bring me back to baseline.

AKA the bigger the discharge, the bigger the rebound.

Low intensity workouts + rest days never discharge that stress build up. The chronic load just…sits there.

Slow-twitch vs fast-twitch

Fun fact: during my freshman year tryouts for the high school soccer team, I had the second worst time in the mile run. Not a great way to be viewed by your coach when trying to make the team.

But then we hopped on the field to scrimmage + my energy seemed endless. Making runs, getting into the right positions on the field as needed, etc. Endurance didn’t seem to be an issue like it had been on the track earlier in the day.

Finally, we wrapped with full field sprints. And here the inverse of the mile run happened - I was first or second to hit the endline each time.

It was years later that I’d learn there was a physiological definition of this: I fall HARD to the right toward the type-II (aka fast-twitch) muscle fiber scale compared to the type-I (aka slow-twitch) side.

Those who skew toward slow-twitch do well in heavy endurance activities (think: marathons, cycling, etc.). Those who skew toward fast-twitch do well in “explosive” activities (think: sprinting, powerlifting, etc.). There’s no good or bad when it comes to one or the other, it’s just a matter of knowing what you’re more predisposed to.

The reason I share that is because that was the key to solving + breaking my stress cycle.

First, it means my sympathetic system is wired to fire hard + recover fast. It’s designed to handle spikes, not sustained low-level activation. High intensity training plays right into this benefit.

Second, it means my parasympathetic rebound after high-intensity training is stronger than it would be in a slow-twitch individual. When I flush stress heavily through high-intensity work, I recover fully by clearing it from my system.

Pretty cool, right?

Most advice is geared toward the average

This single insight should probably have me cancelling my WHOOP membership.

When I let stress build + don’t get a hard workout in, my HRV data illustrates that by rapidly declining/being below my “normal” rate. WHOOP translates this as a “red” day and basically says “hey, you should probably take it easy today.”

But in knowing my psychological + physiological profile, as well as listening to my body to understand if I’m truly feeling “red” (AKA sore muscles, feeling sick, etc.), usually that HRV drop is from the catecholamine build up + needing to be cleared out.

So I disregard those “red” days + push myself. And my body (and mind) thank me. And my WHOOP data even shows this benefits me:

On red recovery days (recovery score ≤ 33%), my workout strain averages 16 (compared to yellow days of 12 or green days of 13). And my next-day recovery score is usually a significant improvement.

On Thursday this past week I decided to be a masochist + go for a hard run when it was 93ºF out. Absolutely brutal run + I was gassed when I finished. Normally this would show up the next day as a dropoff in HRV as a body recovers. Mine shot up 🤷‍♂️

Friday recovery = function of Thursday’s actions + sleep

This is a flat out inversion of WHOOP’s algorithm that’s built on population averages where red = rest. My autonomic nervous system doesn’t follow that model. I share this not to say look at how unique of a special snowflake I am, but to show why it’s so important to understand + figure out what works for YOU.

Obviously, I watch for genuine sickness + injury signals via elevated skin temp, elevated resting respiratory rate, general “how am I feeling” check + treat those days differently.

Why I’m sharing this

If you’re feeling even more stressed or burned out this year than before, you aren’t alone.
It’s easier than ever to understand your unique makeup thanks to access to health metrics (think: wearables like WHOOP + Oura, bloodwork testing via your doctor or Function Health) + AI tools that can analyze and then synthesize the huge amounts of data contained in those.
To share the (very imperfect) prompts I’ve used to help me get to these insights in case you want to work through any of this for yourself:
1. “I want you to help optimize my health. First we'll baseline my general health via uploaded data from my WHOOP (csv files) as well as recent blood test results + supporting clinician notes from them. First thing - give me a breakdown of what you're seeing + be brutally honest. I want to hear what's really good, what's good, what's ok, what's bad, and what's terrible.”
  1. Note: after you go through this + get outputs from your LLM of choice, I simply did some back + forth chatting to better understand why things were/weren’t good, etc.
2. After an appropriate amount of time has passed + you’ve taken action on insights, come back to see what has/hasn’t changed.
  “I’m currently exporting out my most recent whoop data + want to see how that’s looking compared to the prior period when you last reviewed it all.
  I want you to clearly pull out anything that’s different from that prior period (good AND bad) across all major + minor metrics. Then we can look at the behaviors + variables that we think are playing into those (can pull from the journal entries + I want you to ask me questions that wouldn’t show up in the journal but that we know influence things).
  Before I upload this, I want to see your plan of approaching this, the data you’re going to show/compare, etc.”
  1. Note: push back on responses. Like WHOOP, LLMs are based on the average of data + insights, so make sure you guide it with your unique makeup, quirks, etc. to account for those.

From there, the sky’s the limit. Since I love tracking data + trends to hold myself accountable, I had it help me get it into a visual that I can use + build off of as time goes on. Then for things like bloodwork deficiencies, I asked for different whole foods + supplements that I could incorporate into my diet to improve those.

Simple. Easy. Geeky. Call it what you want, but it’s been fun to learn more about myself AND know that by taking action on these things I’ve been able to already start to feel physically + mentally better. Win-win all around.

A few examples of the visuals:

See you next Saturday,
Sam

The 3 Us: Users, Usage, + Uses

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:15:10 GMT

Hey friends - it’s Sam + welcome back for your regular Saturday edition of Marketing Meditations where I dig into a marketing observation, idea, or lesson I encountered recently.

Today is a special edition as it’s the first official “guest post” on here + it’s one I’m incredibly proud of as it’s coming from Elie Daccache, a member of my team at Loxo. Funny enough, it was through this very newsletter a couple of years ago that Elie + I started emailing back and forth each week, him sharing his thoughts about the newsletter with me + helping to sharpen the things I was learning.

Elie has one of the most insatiable growth mindsets I’ve ever encountered, so when he asked me a few weeks ago if I’d be open to having him collab on a newsletter here, the answer was an immediate yes. What follows is something he’s recently learned from a mentor of his when it comes to finding new growth levers, even when you think you’ve tapped out what’s at your disposal.

So without further ado, I’ll let Elie take it from here…

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My mentor, the general manager of a $300m fast-moving consumer goods division at Fattal, one of the largest distributors in the Levant, spent a week sitting in the living rooms of strangers, watching women clean their houses. He didn’t need to. He had analysts, panel data and a market-research budget most chief marketing officers would envy. He chose instead to spend a week on the sofas of married, stay-at-home women across several regions of Lebanon, notebook in hand, watching them wipe floors and scrub sinks. By the end of the week he had the insight that would grow one of his brands sevenfold in two years, and it came from noticing something no dataset had thought to record: the woman in front of him already owned a product that could clean her entire house, and had bought half a dozen others to do jobs it already did.

That one observation contains the whole argument, so it’s worth seeing how he got there.

The problem nobody prepares you for

Most of us spend our careers trying to win a market. My mentor inherited the opposite problem. The portfolio handed to him was made up of brands that had already won, several sitting at around 88% market share and one higher still. At that altitude the familiar playbook stops working, because there’s little meaningful share left to take from competitors who have almost none, and no obvious way to enlarge a number that’s already pressed against its ceiling. So he faced two difficulties at once: preserving the extraordinary share he’d inherited, and still growing sales in markets everyone around him considered saturated.

If you run B2B software marketing, you know this one in your bones, even if the products couldn’t be more different. It’s the plateau. The obvious ideal-customer profile has been worked through, pipeline flattens, and sooner or later someone says the market’s been saturated and the room accepts it as a fact of nature.

That conclusion is almost always premature, and the reason is the framework my mentor built to escape it, which he called the 3 Us. His premise was that market share isn’t a single number but the product of three separate levers, and that a business convinced it has run out of room has usually exhausted one of them while leaving the other two untouched. The first is Users, meaning how many people use the product. The second is Usage, meaning how often they use it. The third is Uses, meaning how many different jobs they use it for. Each brand in his portfolio happened to be stuck on a different lever, which makes them an unusually clean way to watch all three at work, and each one translates with surprising directness into a growth motion you can run in software.

How he grew Dettol’s sales 7x in 2 years

Back to the living room. In the Middle East at the time, Dettol carried a reputation problem disguised as a strength. Everyone knew the brand, and everyone knew it for exactly one thing: it was the disinfectant you used to clean a bathroom. It also sold at roughly four times the price of the nearest detergent competitor, which made it premium, respected and thoroughly boxed in. A product understood to have a single job can only be bought for that job, and its ceiling gets set accordingly.

Rather than commission a repositioning campaign from behind his desk, my mentor borrowed the method of “Blue Ocean Strategy” and went looking for the uncontested space himself. He set up an observational study of the core audience, the married women who ran these households, and embedded with them for a week to watch how the cleaning actually happened.

And what he saw resolved the whole problem. The women used Dettol for the bathroom, and only for the bathroom, exactly as its reputation dictated. For every other surface in the house, the floors, the sinks, the fixtures and the wood, they reached for a different bottle, and had accumulated half a dozen of them under the counter. Yet the contents of those bottles were, chemically, almost identical to the Dettol already sitting in the cupboard. What separated one product from the next wasn’t the formula but the degree of dilution. The customer was buying five extra products to do jobs the one she already owned could handle, had anyone bothered to tell her the right dilution for each.

That’s the lever he called Uses, and it relocates where growth actually comes from. The additional sales weren’t waiting in a new customer or a new product but in the unused capacity of the product already on the shelf. Two questions fall out of it, and both are worth keeping. How many more ways can the same customer use the product? And what different customer might use the very same product for an entirely different job?

So Dettol got un-boxed. From the bathroom disinfectant it became a multi-surface, multi-room product suitable for floors, walls and fixtures, and even for the kind of hygiene prep appropriate to an operating room. The molecule didn’t change; the number of jobs it was sold for did. Sales grew sevenfold within two years. Der General, another brand in the portfolio run on the same logic, tripled.

Uses have a metabolism

Then he did something most brand marketers wouldn’t have bothered with, and it’s the part that turns a tidy anecdote into a forecasting method. A new use doesn’t merely add a reason to buy; it adds a rate of consumption. During the same study his team logged how often the women cleaned each part of the house, broken down by region and by age group, and how much product each job consumed. A bathroom cleaned twice a week at three bottle-caps a time accounted for six caps weekly; floors cleaned three times a week at a single cap each accounted for three more. Sum that across every use a given segment had adopted, and you could see how quickly a household would empty a bottle and therefore when it would need to buy the next one. Purchasing frequency, segment by segment, derived from what people actually did rather than guessed from a trend line.

This is the muscle B2B technology is about to need. Software has long been forecast on the basis of seats, which are convenient because a seat is a headcount that renews on a predictable annual cycle. The industry is now moving fast toward usage and consumption-based pricing, and AI products in particular tend not to bill by the seat at all but by the token, the run, the workflow or the outcome. In that world per-seat forecasting doesn’t merely lose accuracy; it stops describing the business. What replaces it is exactly what he built with a notebook on a stranger’s sofa: a bottom-up model of consumption that asks how many distinct jobs a segment runs the product for, how heavy each job is, and how often it recurs. Answer those questions and you get more than a cleaner lifetime value. You get timing, an estimate of when a given account will hit its next genuine need, which is the single most useful input a retargeting or expansion campaign can have, because it lets you show up the moment the bottle runs dry instead of broadcasting to the whole list at once. In a consumption-priced market that bottom-up plan, built from the 3 Us and plain old qualitative research, becomes the forecast itself rather than a supplement to it.

There’s a more immediate reason the Uses lever matters to a marketer, which is that every new use is a fresh universe of demand. While Dettol stayed the bathroom disinfectant it competed for a single cluster of intent, one set of keywords and queries and one position on the shelf. The moment it became a floor cleaner, a wood-surface cleaner and an operating-room prep, each of those uses brought its own keywords, its own search volume, its own audiences, its own ad sets and its own content. A new use adds a whole addressable surface to go compete for. So when paid search plateaus and the keyword list feels tapped out, the more productive question usually isn’t how to bid harder on the terms you already have but which use of the product you’ve never actually advertised.

Because each unadvertised use is untapped volume sitting in plain sight.

The Durex problem: nowhere to go but usage

Durex presented the opposite constraint. It held 88% of its market, which left essentially no room on the Users lever, since a number that high can’t absorb many new customers. Nor could the brand plausibly invent a portfolio of new Uses, there being only so many jobs a condom can be sold for. Unless you’re a little creative, of course.

Two of the three levers were, for all practical purposes, pinned in place, which left Usage: getting existing users to use the product more often.

The complication was that he was working in a devout Lebanese market where sex is taboo, hardly a subject a brand can address with a straightforward instruction to buy more. So growth took the form of education and awareness aimed largely at younger people, normalising the conversation and funding the kind of advertising that raises the frequency of the behaviour the product depends on, without ever being able to fall back on the blunt commercial message a less sensitive category would use.

The parallel in software is the lever most teams under-invest in, because raising usage is less glamorous than winning new logos. When the Users count is saturated and no new Uses are available, growth has to come from frequency: activation, feature adoption, the formation of habits and the depth of the relationship with the accounts already signed. Under consumption pricing this isn’t a soft metric but the revenue itself, since more usage of the same use by the same users flows straight into the bill. Durex could add neither users nor uses and so competed entirely on frequency; plenty of software companies could grow substantially without signing a single new customer if they did the same.

The OMO problem, solved in a supermarket aisle

The third lever produced the story where the general manager left the building most literally. In late 2019 Lebanon suffered the sharpest economic collapse in its history. The currency fell apart and government-subsidised consumer goods flooded the shelves, which for a portfolio of premium brands was close to an extinction event, as subsidies and acute price sensitivity commoditised the category and set off a race to the bottom. Among his brands the weakest position belonged to OMO, a laundry detergent owned by Unilever, hovering at around 2% market share.

The move available from the desk was to cut price, protect margin and concede the year. My mentor drove to the supermarkets instead. The general manager of a $300m division went from shop to shop across the country to see for himself what was happening at the shelf, and in every location he found the same scene: crowds gathered around the subsidised goods, each of which wore a bright red-and-yellow sticker reading مَدْعُوم, Arabic for “subsidised”. Shoppers weren’t comparing brands or reading labels; they were navigating by the sticker, which had become the most valuable piece of shelf real estate in the country. He would have never realized this had he not stood right in the aisle.

There was the play. He talked the executive team and the board into giving him a budget to subsidise OMO with Fattal’s own money, undercutting the government’s price and putting the brand in the same discount conversation, and then printed the very same red-and-yellow sticker the subsidised goods carried, adding beneath it the words “subsidised by Fattal”. He borrowed the visual cue shoppers had already been trained to trust and pointed it at his own struggling brand. The forecast tells you how little anyone expected of OMO: even assuming the experiment worked, the plan was to sell ten shipping containers of product across the entire year. They sold out in a week, roughly fifty-two times the annual forecast in seven days.

Several lessons sit inside that result, each with a direct analogue in technology. The first is to go down to the market yourself no matter how senior you are, because a $300m general manager standing in an aisle saw what no report would have surfaced; a report averages away the very detail that mattered, and the most reliable market research is still the kind you do with your own eyes at the moment of purchase. The second is that shelf space is itself a touchpoint rather than neutral inventory, working at once as an advertisement, a trust signal and a decision-making environment. Its digital equivalent is everything surrounding the moment a prospect decides: bottom-funnel search, whether an AI assistant recommends the product, on-page experience and navigation, all the surfaces a buyer touches while actively weighing a purchase, and most software teams leave them to chance while obsessing over the top of the funnel. The third is that shelf share correlates with market share, since the more effortlessly available a product is at the point of decision, the more it sells, which for software means earning presence on the surfaces that genuinely matter to your buyer rather than the ones a category report happens to list, or intuition assumes, or best practice recommends. The last is to borrow from markets that look nothing like your own: his edge came from lifting a government’s subsidy sticker and re-aiming it at a detergent, and the most defensible promotional ideas tend to come from outside your own category, in a mechanism that works somewhere else and can be adapted before anyone nearby thinks to.

Why the 3 Us resist automation

Seen together, the three stories share a quality that matters now in particular. None of the insights existed in a dataset. The Dettol breakthrough came from a week spent watching dilution habits on a sofa; the OMO play came from noticing which sticker a crowd gravitated toward; the Durex motion came from understanding a specific cultural taboo well enough to work around it. Each one needed primary observation and a creative leap, the act of going somewhere, watching something, and connecting two things that weren’t obviously related.

That’s the work a language model can’t do on your behalf. A model will happily generate a hundred variations of the keywords you already have, but it can’t spend a week in a stranger’s living room and come back understanding that the customer is buying five products to do one product’s job. The raw material for a new U is gathered in the field and assembled with imagination, which is the part that stays scarce precisely as everything downstream of it gets cheap to automate. The framework is defensible against AI because its inputs are.

For the same reason the 3 Us work as a brainstorming engine for marketing, not just for product development. When growth stalls, you can run the portfolio against three questions: which segments of Users have we never gone after, which Uses of the product have we never advertised, and how could we get existing users to higher Usage. Most teams, hitting a plateau, reach only for the first of these, chase more users, and conclude the market is tapped out when that lever gets stiff. My mentor’s career is a sustained argument that the ceiling you run into is rarely the market’s, and far more often the two levers you forgot you were holding. Nothing in the data said a premium brand known for a single job, in a market widely judged mature, had a sevenfold gain sitting inside it. It had been there the whole time, in the gap between what the customer bought the product for and what the product could actually do.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

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I was stuck, so I went for a walk

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 10:15:10 GMT

I was stuck.

I was sitting at my desk, staring at the screen of my laptop, waiting for a moment of insight to hit me. Waiting to uncover what would help me get our marketing out of a plateau we’d been in for a few months.

A minute passed.
5 more minutes passed.
Another 20 minutes passed.

And there I sat, no closer to getting unstuck + no flashes of brilliance anywhere in sight.

So I grabbed the pup, put his leash on, and we went for a walk.

Left the headphones at home, no podcast or music playing, just a good old fashioned walk to let my mind “air out” a bit.

A half hour later, we’re back home + I had 8 different notes saved in my phone containing ideas + insights to dig into to help break out of the plateau.

And that’s what leads to today’s newsletter. A quick reminder that going for a walk remains undefeated whenever we get stuck, and a list of ideas + plays you can steal the next time you find your funnel’s hit a plateau at a certain stage.

Here are the plays I've run/tested over the years to break through each stage of our funnel.

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A few months ago I was talking to a VP of Marketing + they said they were exploring/in negotiations with one of the sponsors of this newsletter after learning about them here + seeing them as a product that I endorse. That’s the power of these types of partnerships done well (vs. the AI influencer dumpster fire some are experimenting with).

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Constraint #1: website visits > handraiser rate

You’re getting people to your website, but want to increase the rate at which they take action.

Play 1.1: Add more conversion points across the website

The CMO who realizes they don’t have enough conversion points on their site

Don’t let the simplicity/obviousness of this one fool you. I’ve overindexed before on the sticky nav to do the heavy lifting of converting web visitors, assuming they’d know to go there when they were ready to take action.

Make the experience as easy as possible for your visitors. CTAs in the nav, hero, sprinkled throughout the scroll experience of the page content, + the footer are near-requirements. Then feel free to experiment with things like in-app chat popups, exit-intent banners, etc. if you really want to go nuts.

Play 1.2: Social proof

The prospect might be smaller, in a different location, etc. than others, but they’re ultimately looking to achieve the same thing

“Is this product/service built specifically for people like me, struggling with the type of problem we’re currently experiencing?”

This is the question every web visitor is asking themselves when they hit the website. And it’s SO important that this is answered as quickly as possible.

The problem is most visitors are skeptical of marketing claims like “#1 [category] software” since everyone says that. The best way to counter this is to get specific AND do so using data from the customers you have that are exactly like those visiting the site.

Logos are great for recognition + telling a visitor that companies like them use your product. But the real power comes when you can grab quotes + real results from them that answer the second question the prospect has - that they solved the problem and are now thriving.

Play 1.3: CRO experiments

The best way to break through this constraint is to simply get experiments in play + adopt a mentality of continuous iteration on them.

Every persona + market operates differently, so blanket best practices for how pages should be laid out, the type of content that should be surfaced, etc. is a watered-down average. The best websites operate using what they’ve learned from their market + buyers specifically.

Whether it’s as simple as button colors or as specific as the medium + style in which content is being presented, there’s always room for growth when it comes to this play.

Play 1.4: Interactive demo

Letting visitors experience your product before committing to a meeting removes the biggest objection they have (”I don’t know if this is worth my time”).

Visitors who complete a product tour on the website convert to handraisers at a significantly higher rate than non-product tour viewers. Bonus is that they also typically convert from handraiser to SQO at a higher rate as they go into the call with your sales team already understanding what it is that the product does.

Play 1.5: Objection handling content

Actual footage of you handling objections + confirming the prospect’s decision to get in touch

“There’s no way our finance team will approve this purchase.”
”I don’t have access to the data this tool needs in order to work.”

The list of objections goes on and on. Most companies rely on the prospect getting into the conversation with sales so they can answer these questions.

The problem with that is there’s a good chunk of people who never fill out the form because they believe they already know the answer to it + that the call won’t be worth it. That’s why proactively presenting this type of content is a wildly underused tactic on the website + one I’m increasingly bullish on moving forward.

Constraint #2: not enough handraisers

Play 2.1: Use case videos

Your prospect after seeing how much easier something they’re struggling with could be done

Similar to the interactive demo on the website, proactively getting use case videos out to the market is the epitome of “show, don’t tell.”

When your prospects see how easy it is to solve their problem vs. being told (and as a result, skeptical of) by a sales rep that the product/service will solve their problem is a night + day difference.

Play 2.2: Paid ads

This one’s pretty self-explanatory 🤷‍♂️

If you aren’t running anything, pushing ads out to your ICP will give you a boost. If you are running ads, making sure you’re hitting the right people (strong targeting) + are using compelling content (videos, thought leader ads, etc.) are the two buckets with the most opportunity to optimize.

Play 2.3: Give value to get value

“Register for a demo + we’ll send you a $100 Amazon gift card!”

Great way to get demo requests, terrible way to get SQOs. Most come for the gift card + very few go on to be SQOs.

The idea here is strong in that it pulls people into your funnel who may not quite be compelled enough to take action, but the execution/”carrot” being used is wrong.

Best thing to do is give the prospect value that only you uniquely can give them AND that it’s a function of the product/service you’re marketing.

Here’s an example of one I’m running right now:

Actual ad I’m currently running. 2.96% CTR + 3.18% engagement rate (vs. LI standard 0.3% CTR/engagement rate)

ICP is clearly called out in the creative
Desired/impressive result is clearly called out in the creative
The answer to how this is possible is called out in the creative
The post copy contains more examples of desired outcomes
The post copy CTA is value-led to the prospect that’s a no brainer - they get help on a role they’re struggling with and can see how the software works in practice (not theory)

Play 2.4: Update stale content on site

Google + LLMs are putting increased weight on the recency of content to determine what they serve up to searchers.

Most websites have countless pieces of content floating around. Go back + refresh/update the heavy hitters. Toss in new data, provide new context, etc. and make sure the page has something like “published on” or “last updated on” so that it can be indexed and considered appropriately.

Play 2.5: Referral program

People love to tell others about things they love. You probably already have a fair bit of growth due to word of mouth whether you know it or not, but the key here is putting a proper incentive behind it.

The best referral programs operate under a “you win AND they win” incentive. Think: they get a month free + you get a month free.

Constraint #3: handraiser > SQO rate

Play 3.1: remove demo scheduling friction

Most companies’ processes for scheduling demos post-form submission

Another obvious one that most of you here have probably implemented over the past few years, but sharing because this should be a non-negotiable now.

Allow prospects to schedule the date + time of their demo as soon as they fill out the form. Reducing friction between the request + getting them to the discovery call converts more demos into qualified opportunities.

Play 3.2: ICP/targeting refinement

It’s nice to have a broader pool to target with ads, emails, calls, etc. But have you ever noticed how certain segments/personas seem to do better/worse at turning into SQOs? I bet you have.

Take that data + layer it into your prospecting efforts. If we know you can get a bunch of demos from a certain industry, but they rarely convert into SQOs, then we’re just on the lead gen hamster wheel + pretending we’re hitting our goals since demos are technically coming through. Tighten up industries, job titles, etc. and watch this rate increase.

Play 3.3: channel audit

Similar to the above, there are channels where we know we can get a higher volume of leads from them, but they usually convert at much lower levels than others (looking at you Facebook…).

If you aren’t to the point of diminishing returns on a channel that does convert well to SQO, this is where I typically pull back budget from the “higher” demo volume, but lower SQO volume (function of that conversion rate) + allocate that over to the channel that does convert better.

Play 3.4: lead qualification process

The look an AE gives you when they realize the “lead” they just got is zero percent qualified

BANT. MEDDIC. CHAMP. SPIN. NEAT.

The list of sales qualification methodologies goes on and on. The main thing is to simply pick one that works for your organization + standardize it across the team.

A tighter qualification framework reduces inconsistency in how reps assess the fit of leads coming through + that typically results in improving this conversion rate as you iterate over time on what you find does/doesn’t convert well.

Constraint #4: SQO > win rate

Play 4.1: gifting/direct mail

This one needs to be used with common sense, but let the psychological principle of reciprocity work in your favor.

The best plays to use in this 4th constraint bucket all revolve around 1:1, relationship-based dynamics. Take the time to research the people you’re engaging with in the deal + send them something that pairs in with that finding.

The value isn’t as important as the signal this gives the prospect of you taking the time to show you value them at a 1:1 level + that this is a representation of what working with your company over the long-term will be like.

Play 4.2: executive sponsor

I don’t have hard data on this, but I can tell you that any time I’ve had the CEO or other leader of a company jump into the conversation when I’m evaluating software/services, I buy from that vendor far more than I don’t.

There’s a certain weight that the attention of executives carries with the market + the more you can leverage that inside deals, the better the outcomes typically are.

Play 4.3: get face time

Shared experiences are just about undefeated when it comes to forming/strengthening relationships

Whether it’s a simple drop-in to a prospect’s office to bring them cookies from a local bakery or a more formal onsite presentation for the team you’re selling to, face time goes a longggg way in closing deals.

Better yet, get prospects outside of the office. Take them to dinner. Have them meet you for an “experience” type event. TBH anything that gets them outside of the “buttoned up” persona they feel they need to carry in the office + into an environment where they can be more like themselves.

Bonus tip: don’t limit this to executives/”buyer” personas only. Get the internal champions + power users involved here. These individuals are more impactful to your deal closing than any other factor once you hit SQO stage.

Putting this into action

If you know where in the funnel you’re constrained, get some experiments in play. Steal some from the above, or spin up an account in Affect where there are 50+ different, proven plays you can run to break through the plateau. Perk of that platform is that not only do you get access to all of the plays, but when you commit to a play, it logs the current conversion rate/volume so you can see its impact after the experiment period.

AKA no more wondering “what’s working” - you can see it with your own data.

Founding member rate is still available - 45 left at $99/mo, locked in for life. Or, as one of the first users said:

"It's $99 and cancelable after 30 days, it's pretty risk-free. I pay more for an Uber to the airport."

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See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. next weekend is the 4th of July here in the US, so no newsletter as I’ll be spending time with the fam. See you on the 11th :)

Beware the s(AI)cophant

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 10:15:24 GMT

sycophant

noun
sy·co·phant

A sycophant is a servile, self-seeking flatterer who acts insincerely towards those in power in order to gain a personal advantage. Often called "yes-men," "toadies," or "brown-nosers," sycophants prioritize pleasing superiors—agreeing with everything they say and showering them with unearned praise—rather than offering honest feedback.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this word lately. More specifically, the last bit of the definition above stating “…sycophants prioritize pleasing superiors—agreeing with everything they say and showering them with unearned praise—rather than offering honest feedback.”

Now think about your most recent conversation with Claude/ChatGPT/etc. How’s that conversation look when viewing through the lens of this word? If they’re anything like mine, they probably look like a sycophant at work. That everything you say is great + everything you propose is brilliant.

But this isn’t a good thing, and here’s why…

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No one likes a “yes man”

Every organization has had these for centuries. The individuals who, as soon as they’re in a room with company leadership or a high-value client, only seem to be overly agreeable to anything presented + quick to compliment them.

They want to be seen as likeable + to be trusted by the leader, so what quicker way to do that than to be overly positive toward them, right?

Nope.

Go ask any leader what they really want + their answer will be someone who tells them the truth. Someone who tells things as they are based on the reality they’re in. They’re surrounded by sycophants already, so the individual who is willing to disagree, who is willing to share truths, no matter how uncomfortable, is actually respected more by the leader.

These are the people who create balanced organizations, who help keep the company from making mistakes because no one’s willing to speak up, to say, “You know, I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think we’re accounting for XYZ here…”

These are the individuals who end up with a seat at “the” table, while the sycophants are all fighting over their middle-management titles + swinging their weight over their teams.

The rise of the s(AI)cophant

Now as more individuals begin to adopt AI + LLMs for their work, these tools become their sparring partner for various ideas, experiments, strategies, feedback sessions, and more.

It’s a great way to role play out scenarios + gut check theories with data that AI can sift through near instantly. BUT, there’s an inherent flaw in most LLMs as of when I’m writing this in June 2026 - that the LLMs are trained sycophants.

Everything you propose is a great idea.
Every response you push back on is met with “you’re right, [your response] is much better.”
Every output is wired to what it thinks will be best received by you, not by what’s factually correct or what’s unbiasedly best.

The end result of this is that you feel great about your work, but when executed upon is rarely what should actually be done when viewed from a logical perspective.

You’re married to a tagline you love, so the LLM weaves it into all of your marketing materials…
…meanwhile, that tagline is a bunch of business jargon that makes zero sense and carries no weight with your audience.

You want to push into a new market because one new deal came through there, so the LLM builds an entire campaign strategy to push into it…
…meanwhile, no validation has been done that the new market is worth it and the current market that has product/market fit is FAR from being close to saturated.

If we don’t have the awareness to think critically about what’s being presented, or have someone willing to push back on these proposals, there’s serious risk of going down the wrong path, fast.

So my ask of everyone reading this: don’t drink the koolaid. (koolAId? sorry, couldn’t help myself at the irony there…)

While it feels great to be told everything we think/do is genius + that there’s always some gold-paved path ahead of us + all we have to do is ask Claude/ChatGPT to lay it out for us, we need to keep a healthy level of skepticism when reviewing these outputs.

Perhaps there’s a lesson from history we can apply in a new context here.

In Roman times, upon returning from battle victorious, it is said that there would often be a servant standing in the chariot behind the general whispering memento mori, which in this context translates to, “remember that you are mortal.”

Yes, this parallel is a bit of a stretch for those of us who are clacking away on our keyboards each day, but always keeping in the back of our minds that not all of our ideas really are “the best” ideas ever, that not all of our plans are perfectly thought through on the first go + need no alterations or input from others.

So maybe it’s better to remember another famous proverb from millenia back as a counter to sycophancy, whether it be in human or AI form - “as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

The best ideas + the best plans often come from iteration and healthy disagreement. It would be a shame for us to lose that as more + more work is delegated to AI to handle.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

The negative touchpoint

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:15:28 GMT

Things commonly seen/heard in the B2B space

AEs sending their 7th email in a 2 week span:
“Hi Sam - Me again 🙃 Apologies for the professional persistence. Here’s a link to my calendar to grab time for us to talk.”

Marketers on email working “well” for them + want to juice it for more:
”Let’s send emails out to our market daily instead of weekly!”

BDRs on cold-calling:
“I double tap (call back to back if no answer) prospects regularly”

Meanwhile, how prospects/customers feel on the receiving side of these tactics:

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Imagine you have a deal sitting in your forecast that’s expected to close, only for it to stall because no next step was scheduled. Or because the decision-maker stopped engaging.

These signals are often unnoticed until it’s too late. The team doesn’t think anything of it when the decision-maker hasn’t replied for a week or two - “they’re probably just busy.” Having an agent that identifies this risk + also proposes a recovery plan (i.e. finding a new champion there + proposing how to engage them) is the natural evolution of how agents should support our efforts.

HockeyStack’s new AI Revenue Agent brings use cases like this to the forefront so GTM practitioners can keep + win the pipeline they worked so hard to generate. This is the future of AI agents in GTM.

Check it out

Here’s the deal

For too long, B2B companies have operated under the impression that touches are either impactful or not impactful, or more simply put, they’re either “positive” or “neutral.” Since these touches are viewed from a “new customer acquisition” lens, it’s viewed as a binary yes or no response to “Did [touchpoint] lead to better business results?” and not “Did [touchpoint] result in the prospect thinking more positively or negatively of us?”

But a CRM will never show negative pipeline created, and that’s precisely why this has been so often overlooked.

Until now.

Put yourself in their shoes

Take a step back from your marketing/sales/etc. role and be your prospect for a minute.

You’ve just received 2 calls back to back from a number you don’t recognize after intentionally screening the first call
A few minutes later, you receive an email that starts with “Me again 🙂 I apologize for my professional persistence, but you could really benefit from [our product/service]. Here’s a link to my calendar to grab time for a demo.”
A handful of hours later, you receive a generic email from their marketing drip sequence inviting you to a webinar…but the persona/segment is the wrong one

All of this in just one day.

And while the above is a fictitious scenario, I can attest firsthand to having the above experience happen to me multiple times over the years (or just last week as you can see from the screenshot below…) as various companies tried to get me to buy from them.

What would you do if you were in your prospects’ shoes? Remember:

You aren’t looking to buy anything right now (+ you certainly don’t want to deal with the internal change management as everyone’s working hard enough to keep up with the new AI mandate in their company…)
You’ve never been to this company’s website, so you aren’t even sure what they really do
You didn’t ask for them to reach out to you
You’re already strapped for time trying to do the things you need to complete in your day-to-day
You flat out don’t trust them or know how credible they are

So how would you respond in this scenario? Would you ignore them? Would you cave and take the call? Would you get furious after receiving the 9th call + email from them?

This last group is one that isn’t accounted for.

Most companies today play the volume game…

Execs after learning about the predictable revenue model:

“If our SDRs make 100 calls/emails per day, we know we’ll get 10 meetings booked and 1 opportunity, so let’s get them on the phone cranking even more out!”

The problem with this math is that while you may get 10 meetings booked and 1 opportunity, you’re not taking into account what happens with the other 90 calls/emails that have been hitting your market over the head 10+ times in the past week.

Of those 90 prospects, here’s what’s likely going to happen:

55 are simply going to ignore you
20 will finally reply and say they’re not interested
10 hit the unsubscribe
5 are completely turned off + you’ve burned the bridge for them to ever become a customer (not to mention the negative word of mouth they’ll spread when peers ask for their opinion…)

Let that sink in for a moment.

Of the 100 emails/calls you’re making, you’re making a trade-off.

10 meetings booked for 5 burned bridges.
1 opportunity today for 5 opportunities that will never come about in the future.

This is the epitome of having a short-term focus only + not thinking about how to grow your company in a sustainable way.

Trading 1 opportunity NOW for 5 opportunities that will NEVER be. But the problem with these 5 burned bridges is that the company simply sees these attempted outreaches as “did not connect” or “unengaged.”

They don’t think about how these messages are perceived by the receiver. They have no way of logging in their CRM that this account is “burned.”

So your CRM spits out campaign results of “10% success in booking meetings, 1% SQO rate,” leading you to believe the other 90% is still fully intact.

The reality of it is that the campaign results look more like “10% success in booking meetings, 1% SQO rate, 5% removed from all potential future opportunities.”

…but leading companies today play the quality game

The best BDRs I know don’t make 100 dials per day, they make 15 and do their due diligence before reaching out to the prospect. The result is much higher conversion rates with those targeted accounts over the next 1-2 quarters.

The best emails I receive from companies are weekly or monthly sends that add value to ME in my role. Instead of wondering how they can increase their open rates from 7% to 9%, they have open rates of over 40% + an audience that looks forward to receiving these.

The best ad campaigns have multiple ad variations + are constantly being iterated upon on a regular basis to stay fresh + relevant. The message and content behind them are timely + relevant to the audience who sees them.

Buyers have the power now

Use common sense with your prospecting + outreach campaigns.

Are you truly creating a relationship with your prospect?
Are you adding value to them before making any type of ask?
Did you even check to make sure your “personalized” template has the right name?

And my personal favorite question that I ask myself before we take anything to the market:

Would you respond to you?

One podcast episode I enjoyed this week

Been a minute since I’ve shared a podcast rec on here. But after hearing this one on a walk this past week, there was a section in there that was too good not to share.

TLDR of it came down to David Senra sharing what he’s learned from studying countless founders + himself when it comes to positive vs negative self talk.

Said there are founders out there like Jensen Huang who would wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and say, “why do you suck so much??” And others like Elon Musk who’ve basically said “my mind is a constant storm. I embrace chaos.”

That ultimately the best founders don’t linger on their wins - that they do something great, celebrate it for maybe a day, and then are back to it. They’ll go to dinner to celebrate, but before the dinner’s over, instead of thinking about that 1 thing that went well, they’re thinking about the 17 that aren’t going right.

Senra then rounded the conversation over to Brad Jacobs, who he said has been in + leading businesses for 45 years + that he realized that mindset wasn’t serving him. After countless conversations with him, Senra finally said to himself, “You love what you do, would you stop doing this? Your negative source of drive isn’t serving you anymore. Now that you love what you do + you think you’ve found your life’s work, your energy should be generative. It should be ‘I’m trying to make something for the world that I love to do and I’m very proud of.’”

That negative self-talk gets you to a point, but then your fuel source has to change because it can/will also destroy you. That in not wanting to do something for 5/10/15 years, but to want to do it forever, that source has to change.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

2 experiments in 2 weeks

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:15:29 GMT

The past few weeks I’ve been spending time “in the weeds” of demand gen + getting some experiments in play to see what we should push harder into as the second half of 2026 is (somehow) nearly upon us.

I always forget how much I love + geek out when I go deep into my “spiky” area of marketing, so while writing this up for you all in the hope that you’ll be able to learn from what is/isn’t working, it’s also a good reminder for myself to make sure I keep coming back to this type of experimentation + execution more often.

And without further ado, here are 2 experiments I’ve been playing around with thie past few weeks…

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Audience targeting: to niche or not to niche

Context

I’m pretty sure I’ve given our team whiplash when it comes to our campaign + audience setup inside LinkedIn Ads. Years ago, we kept it simple + since we had a lock on our ICP definition, we had campaigns primarily structured around “ICP - [region]”. We sell globally, so this was a necessity to make sure that audiences in Australia + Europe didn’t eat the entire daily budget before the US even started its workday.

Last year, we rolled out our ABM “grand plan” that, while I still fully stand by + resource based on, may have been a bit grandiose when it came to translating that into campaigns. We had 3 tiers of accounts, 3 different global regions, 2 core personas within those, and then 4 different types of content to be served. On paper, fully reasonable. But when you look at the total combinations here, that means 3 x 3 x 2 x 4 = 72 campaigns to manage and split budget across…😅

Which led to the “whiplash” moment of getting an experiment back in play to see if we should keep the 72 detailed + specific campaigns going, or if we simplify things back down + reap the benefits of unit economics when it comes to CPMs (cost per 1000 impressions served), CPRs (cost per 1000 unique members reached), etc.

What I’m seeing

So far, it’s promising.

In terms of CPMs…
Control group: $75 in North America, $35 in Europe
Experiment group: $40 in North America, $20 in Europe
✅ 47% + 43% decreases, respectively

In terms of CPRs…
Control group: $452 in North America, $298 in Europe
Experiment group: $118 in North America, $66 in Europe
‼️🤯 74% + 78% decreases, respectively

Lastly, looking at CTRs as a proxy for engagement (note: core variables remained constant - single image ads + “Reach” objective)…
Control group: 0.68% in North America, 0.66% in Europe
Experiment group: 0.61% in North America, 0.79% in Europe
North America is down 10%, but Europe is up 20%

Ok, so North America is “down” and Europe is “up” - is that “down” number in North America worth it? Let’s play this one out with the math…

Say I have $10,000 to spend, at these rates, what does that look like after the campaign has run through the budget for North America (the “down” campaign)?

Control: ($10,000 / $75 CPM) x 1000 = 133,333 impressions x 0.68% CTR = 907 clicks

Experiment: ($10,000 / $40 CPM) x 1000 = 250,000 impressions x 0.61% CTR = 1525 clicks

Conclusion: the 47% decrease in CPMs > the 10% decrease in CTR. Experiment will drive 68% more engagement

Note: yes, this is not a perfect experiment + is making assumptions that aren’t perfectly linear, but when I see a number come out that is this strong, it tells me that this is directionally the better path

Creative variations

Context

I just scrolled my LinkedIn feed + here’s the breakdown of the first 10 ads that showed:

Format
- Static: 6
- Video: 2
- Thought leader: 2
Background color
- Blue: 4
- White: 3
- Gray: 2
- Brown: 1
Message/offer
- Generic product pitch: 4
- “You aren’t doing your job right”: 2
- Target member’s desired result: 2
- Contrarian opinion: 1
- Gift card for demo: 1

I used to joke with my Refine Labs clients back in the day that it’s not hard to stand out in a feed full of blue, single-image B2B ads patting their product on their backs

…and it turns out not much has changed in the past ~4 years as that’s how my feed is still looking today.

So my hypothesis is one that most all marketers hold: if I zig when everyone else is zagging, will that draw in more eyes?

Which led to the experiment:

Lo-fi instead of hi-fi
Handwritten instead of typed
Tell a story instead of feature dumping
Hold a POV instead of sharing a platitude
Focus on the prospect instead of the product

Which led to this letter I “wrote” to the recruiter who is fearful of AI replacing them and what the future of their profession looks like.

What I’m seeing

This one was launched this week + with an experimental budget (read: < 1% of daily budget), so things will likely level out next week, but the initial results have been strong:

0.73% CTR (compared to industry “benchmark” of 0.3%)
32 likes (yes, this can be a function of spend, but as noted above, this has received 1/1000th of the budget of other ads that have been running for > 60 days and still don’t have 32 likes)
Average dwell time of 6.44 seconds (compared to ~4 seconds for our other single-image ads using the same bid strategy)

Conclusion

I overthink things all the time. As a result of that, I have a lean toward accidentally overcomplicating things as well if unchecked. And as my friend Paul Stansik coined years ago, there’s a big difference between simplifiers and complicators.

The “complicator” version of me says make a campaign for each variation of tier x region x persona x content type because it’ll be highly relevant in that case.

The “simplifier” version of me says if our ICP is truly our ICP, ICP x regions will get to that same outcome, but with significantly less resourcing required + more efficiences of scale.

The “complicator” version of me says let’s make ads that showcase the beauty of our product and the value a prospect can get from it.

The “simplifier” version of me says let’s make something that’ll stand out from everything else in the feed + then resonate at a human level by demonstrating empathy instead of being yet another “come buy me!” message.

These experiments reinforced something I've always believed but tend to forget when I'm building campaigns:

The best performing things are usually the simplest things. And the beauty in this is that 1) they’re easy to spin up by nature and 2) are doors that you can walk back out of if they don’t pan out.

If you've been sitting on an idea for an experiment lately, ship it. You don't always need a huge budget or to go through all the formal channels to get something created. Dip your toe in the water to get a sense for if the experiment validates your idea first. And if it does, great, then you can take those findings + really expand things out from there. But most often, we get caught up in thinking we need to set it up as if it’s already proven before taking that first experimental step.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. if you’ve run an experiment lately (or are thinking about one), reply back + let me know what you’re thinking! I always love geeking out over these types of things and yes, I read every response that comes back from these emails :)

Demand creation vs. brand awareness

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 30 May 2026 10:15:49 GMT

You can spend your way to brand awareness, but not demand creation.

A few years ago, I remember that every time I went to YouTube, I saw an ad for Monday.com. Literally every. single. time.

Their “saturation strategy” worked incredibly well when it came to brand awareness. I can still tell you exactly what they do (project management software) + I definitely know their name.

…but I can’t tell you how they’re different from their competitors like Asana, Trello, or Basecamp. I never felt like I was missing out by not using them. They never gave me a reason to switch. They were just... another option. Spending their way to visibility but not conviction.

Their ads were very successful in that they got my attention + communicated what they do, but they never convinced me WHY they are the only option I should go with, what they provide that's different from their competitors in making their customers more successful, or added any value to me that positions them as THE experts in this space. If I got a survey from YouTube or a third-party firm asking if I had heard of Monday.com, the answer would be a resounding yes.

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So why didn’t it create demand?

If they asked if I considered buying their software in the next 12 months, the answer would be no. Why? Because they didn’t *create* any demand.

They didn’t give me a sense of urgency around what I’m missing out on by not using them
I didn’t receive any compelling feeling that they are THE project management platform I should use
They didn’t educate or provide me with any value with insights that they uniquely know as experts in the space
They didn’t communicate any unique point of view or demonstrate any real conviction about what they do

Long story short, they didn’t break out of the commodity bucket - they’re simply another option.

Brand awareness says “Here’s what we do” or “Here’s a memorable tagline,” but demand creation says “Here’s what we believe is broken + why we’re the only ones fixing it correctly.”

First one is yelling really loud into a megaphone + hoping people hear it. The second one comes from a place of conviction + is building a cult.

Building conviction

A few weeks ago I wrote about why companies should have manifestos instead of mission statements. The reason for it is simple: a manifesto forces you to take a stand. I’m also a fan of anti-manifestos + writing a “here’s who we’re absolutely not for.”

Once you have that, the conviction comes through in how you do (or don’t) internalize that.

It changes who you hire
- A “butt in the seat” isn’t going to be the answer to growth. We need to hire experts who believe what you believe + can teach the market why they should too OR people who are passionate + interested in learning about that so they can them help educate others about it.
It changes what content you create
- When you see fuffy + surface-level content, you get hives and can feel yourself recoiling in disgust. You’re driven to teach + share knowledge that can only come from someone who truly understands the space and you can sense their enthusiasm/conviction behind the content.
It changes how prospects see you
- They recognize that you aren’t trying to convince them that you’re “the best [insert any category name] software”. They can see + feel it within 10 seconds.

And this is what ultimately creates demand.

Leveraging internal experts

The true inflection point of where a company will/won’t succeed here is if they have the conviction, but they don’t figure out how to operationalize it.

AKA they write the manifesto, but it just sits on the website buried somewhere in the nav. Meanwhile the demand gen team is running the same old product/feature ad campaigns + the SDRs are using a generic pitch. The conviction never makes it into how you engage the market.

Long-term demand creation requires you to intentionally build + hire (or develop) for expertise. Having the ability to execute well is table stakes, so the people who are passionate about the space deeply enough to want to teach it or find ways to innovate within it are the ones you want.

That type of knowledge, passion, + conviction is hard to fake as prospects can feel the difference between the company that’s trying to sell them something + the company that actually knows how to solve this problem because they’re obsessed with it.

That’s the new 10x moat + is why we’re seeing a few brands really break out in wildly saturated categories this year.

What this looks like in practice

Let's break this down side by side:

Brand Awareness

Messaging: high-level with a focus on answering what you do and/or a memorable tagline
POV/differentiation: NO strong POV/differentiation statement
Audience: total addressable market (broad + large)
Timeline: “always on”
Measuring success: brand recognition + brand recall
Execution: spend a LOT of money on reach + frequency

Demand Creation

Messaging: high-level with a focus on answering what you solve for
POV/differentiation: VERY strong POV/differentiation statement
Audience: ICP (smaller + specific)
Timeline: constrained by success measurements (next point)
Measuring success: pipeline + revenue
How you build it: take a stand, hire those obsessed with your product/industry, + teach this via your content

Put simply, you can drive brand awareness without creating demand, but creating demand requires more than driving brand awareness.

Measuring on a constrained timeline

So this is all very easy to say, but what does it actually mean?

When you’re creating demand, you want to constrain your timeline to understand if the marketing efforts you make today are driving noticeable increases to your pipeline + revenue numbers after a few quarters.

Brand awareness is always on because the goal is increasing brand recognition and recall. The longer you’re out there and the more you spend, the more those metrics go up. But those metrics don’t always mean success on the pipeline and revenue side.

And that’s why for demand creation, driving increased brand awareness isn’t a guarantee that you’ll successfully create demand. You can’t spend your way to pipeline and revenue. Creating demand is more surgical. So the timeline portion is basically saying, “We’ve been doing this for 1-2 quarters now, are we beginning to see actual pipeline + revenue numbers starting to increase?” If you’re successfully creating demand, they will be as you’ve reached the right prospects and with a message resonating in a way that makes them want to switch/buy.

To steal a lesson from an article I wrote about setting expectations + measuring success, you can refer back to this timeline and the “what to watch” KPIs as time progresses. If you’re creating demand, you’ll be moving along this timeline appropriately. If you’re only driving brand awareness, you’ll stall out at the Experiment stage KPIs.

Demand creation is harder to do than brand awareness since it’s more of a function of “who has the most conviction in the category” than it is “who has the most funding in the category.”

But it’s worth it because the prospects who do share your worldview need zero convincing - they’re already sold on the idea, all you have to do is show them you’re on the same page re: that belief.

This is how I believe demand is created in 2026+ and time will tell if this hypothesis is valid or not.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. Here’s a fun Spotify playlist for marketers entering The Conviction Era ❤️‍🔥 - sent this out to all of the Affect customers who’ve signed up this past month + thought some here might appreciate listening in 😊

Common sense > attribution

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 23 May 2026 10:15:27 GMT

A few years ago, we went all in with our dual-motion go-to-market (GTM) offer. We had a great sales-led GTM engine already in place + completely changed the industry by offering the first forever free recruiting ATS/CRM with our product-led GTM offer.

A handful of months in, we were seeing PLG signups steadily rising, but the pipeline and revenue from those signups weren’t following that same trendline. Next to prospects explicitly asking to talk to sales, this should’ve been our second “hottest” pipeline driver…but it wasn’t.

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The cause?

We had a basic marketing nurture series in place for those who signed up, but with these being higher “intent” signups, these should be layups for our BDRs to follow up with and convert.

So I reached out to our top BDR to see how I could help further enable the BDR team with these. What content would be helpful to supply, what objections could they expect + how to speak to those, FAQs, etc. But what was uncovered in the first 5 minutes of that call put a spotlight on the issue when they said:

“I don’t call on these until after 14 days so I get credit”

Me after hearing this reason

At the time, we had a 14-day reverse trial period where the prospect would have full access to the entire platform. After the 14-day window was up, they would be downgraded to the “Free” version. Based on this, there were rules in place that prevented BDRs from getting any credit or compensation for converting the PLG leads within the first 14 days because they were “attributed to marketing, not BDRs.”

Attribution was holding us back from business growth.

Worrying about who would get credit for pipeline or revenue was literally holding us back from even creating pipeline or driving revenue.

The fix

The actual fix for this was wildly simple - don’t get caught up in attribution. But putting this into practice is much easier said than done due to things like compensation plans, budgeting, egos, and more.

So we went back to our north star metric: revenue.

Is what we’re solving for here going to increase revenue? Yes.
Is what’s holding us back from doing this internal processes or red tape? Yes.
Can this be solved by changing said processes? Yes.

There was our answer. And within the next week here’s what happened:

We had BDRs starting the sequence we built together ASAP instead of waiting 14 days
Marketing and Sales leadership reworked the BDR compensation plan for these
Pipeline from the PLG signups shot up immediately

Remember: the goal of attribution isn’t to say “Who gets credit for this?” but to answer “What’s working to drive business?”

Once you overcome that hurdle, that’s when the magic happens as team siloes are broken down and true cross-departmental teamwork begins, resulting in a better customer experience + better business results.

And this reinforces a belief I will go to the grave with: a successful GTM program needs to be treated as an ecosystem, not a set of channels.

Marketing can drive countless signups, but if BDRs and sales aren’t there to engage them + help qualify, marketing won’t be successful.

BDRs and sales can have killer conversion rates + success with converting signups, but if they don’t have marketing driving signups their way, BDRs and sales won’t be successful.

Moral of the story when it comes to marketing + sales:

The success of each depends upon the other.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. if you liked today’s newsletter or have enjoyed some of the earlier ones, forward this along to a marketer you think would like it as well 🙂 This newsletter grows by word of mouth + I can see which weeks resonate more/less with you all based on how many people do (or don’t 😅) subscribe after reading.

It's not for everyone

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:15:36 GMT

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Most of you have probably read or heard this famous quote from Steve Jobs/Apple. It’s iconic and companies reguarly point to it as aspiration for how they want their marketing to be + their business to be perceived.

Meanwhile, companies will also have the blandest, least-inspiring sentence in the world for their mission statement. Here’s Apple’s:

“To bring the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services.”

If you’re a potential customer, employee, or investor, which of these is drawing you to take the final step? Definitely not the latter…

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Imagine you have a deal sitting in your forecast that’s expected to close, only for it to stall because no next step was scheduled. Or because the decision-maker stopped engaging.

These signals are often unnoticed until it’s too late. The team doesn’t think anything of it when the decision-maker hasn’t replied for a week or two - “they’re probably just busy”

Having an agent that identifies this risk + also proposes a recovery plan (i.e. finding a new champion there + proposing how to engage them) is the natural evolution of how agents should support our efforts.

Check it out

Why don’t we see more manifestos?

Manifestos are inspirational. They’re inclusive in that they’re written to invite people into the world they’re building. They say “I see you” and paint a picture of who you could be by joining them.

They immediately give you a sense for what the company stands for + who they’re building for. They don’t leave you guessing toward why they exist and who they want to join them for the ride.

To be honest, I’ve started to think that manifestos, when written well, are a better way to define and communicate your ICP (ideal customer profile) than the “traditional” ICP worksheet that simply lists out things like job titles, company sizes, etc. There’s no ambiguity when you read a manifesto - you either immediately identify as a “crazy one…the round peg in the square hole” or you don’t.

Yet go to any company’s website, and I’d put my money on 99% of them not having some type of manifesto anywhere on them. And I think the main reason for this is because manifestos force you to draw a line in the sand + take a clear stand for what you are (and are not). But because having those types of lines drawn means writing off potential future TAM, or potentially triggering 0.0001% of those you could sell to, that risk is seen as too great by legal, leadership, the board, or investors, so we play it safe and don’t publish one. We stick with the safe mission statement that says something like “To bring the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services” which means absolutely nothing and could be said by just about any company in the market you serve.

The force multiplying power of a manifesto

A handful of weeks ago, I wrote about how in this new age of AI + vibe coding, the “new 10x” is no longer a 10x better product, but the underlying knowledge + expertise the company possesses.

Anyone can build/copy a product now, but if they don’t know why the product was built a certain way or have the first principles understanding of how it’s solving the use case of those they serve, they won’t last long.

One thing I’ve been thinking about since writing this was that that’s just one part of the new 10x. There’s a second component to it that will become the force multiplier - the underlying beliefs the company holds and being unapologetic about what they are + who they’re for.

People flocked to Apple because they saw themselves as one of the “crazy ones.” For those who didn’t see themselves that way, that was fine, Microsoft was there for those who were more conservative.

But the force multiplier part of Apple inviting those to join their world, that came in the form of creating lifelong customers who would keep coming back to buy the newest model, or would proudly show a friend the iMac they bought from this new + innovative computer company.

Late 1990s iMacs

AI would never smoke a cigarette with you

A few months ago, the CEO of Air, a software platform that helps manage creative assets + workflows, wrote a letter that they had published as a full-page spread in the New York Times. To me, it read like a manifesto. I immediately got a sense for who they were for and what their stance was on something that was becoming quite divisive/worrisome for those in the space they were in.

Here’s what their CEO, Shane, wrote:

AI would never smoke a cigarette with you.
In life we long for simple stories, and these days the headlines deliver:
“AI will replace you.”
Each week, there’s a new AI startup that claims its product will make creatives obsolete. Photographers, videographers, graphic designers, illustrators: highly specialized individuals who have spent decades turning crazy ideas into something everyone can visualize.
If anyone should be buying into this narrative, it’s me.
In 2018 my friend Tyler and I started a tech company called Air. We told investors that every company was becoming a media company. And, if true, every company would need an engine to scale their creative work.
Over the last eight years we’ve raised $70M to build this engine.
Today, nearly all of our product resources have shifted to build AI centric features. Our best engineers spend most days evaluating AI written code. But after nearly a decade working with over 250,000 creatives, I’ve built a rather rigid, shockingly unorthodox belief:
AI will never replace creative work.
Creative work starves for originality.
A person decides where the story begins, which frame feels right, or whether the work should even continue to exist. The best pieces of content require doubt and indecision.
The difference between a creative and a machine is this obsessive anxiety.
Artificial intelligence is trained to find patterns and recommend the most common answer. The machine aims for objectivity. It can generate images, resize assets, translate languages, and optimize performance.
It’s always correct, but it’s not always right.
AI would never tell you to slow down.
It would never argue that further introspection might change the work.
You won’t find AI smoking a cigarette at 9AM on Howard and Lafayette. Only a beautifully inefficient mind would believe cancerous reflection could improve its work.
Over the coming months every company you know will be reshaped into an unrecognizable form. Smaller teams. More machines.
But the organizations that survive will require human beings who are willing to take risks. These people understand that letting what they love kill them is a uniquely human trait. Their illogical texture for life is something machines can’t compute.
At Air, the value of our product is shaped by a creative’s direction.
We use AI to help them scale their work, but deciding when, where, and how to deploy this technology remains defiantly human.
The best creative work is always an argument.
I’m around if you want to share yours.
—Shane

What I loved about this was how quickly I could see/feel what he was writing about. All of the “AI will replace you” headlines we’re constantly bombarded with + fearing what that means for our future. But then he hit us with the following lines:

“Creative work starves for originality”

“The difference between a creative and a machine is this obsessive anxiety.”

“Artificial intelligence is trained to find patterns and recommend the most common answer. The machine aims for objectivity. It can generate images, resize assets, translate languages, and optimize performance. It’s always correct, but it’s not always right.”

I could feel those and I could tell that Shane (and by transitive property, Air) understood me. So as we all look to find our differentiator from the rest of our competitors, this type of POV is where the moat lives. There are countless tools out there that help with creative workflow + management capabilities, but how many of them have the true first principles understanding of their audience to be able to demonstrate that to their market? I’d bet very few.

And this is why I think Air will win in the long run.

I’ve done this terribly, and I’ve done this well

I’m in an interesting spot right now where I’m operating like many of you - in house as part of a larger marketing/GTM function (AKA my day job at Loxo). Then I also have the moonlighting work I’m doing with Affect, building every part of the company from scratch. And it’s a tale of two opposites.

At Loxo, we’re in an incredibly crowded space. An ungodly number of alternatives exist across the entire set of use cases we help recruiters solve for. While I’m 100% biased and think we’re certainly one of the best, I’ll also be real with you + admit that we don’t (currently) have a manifesto or have drawn any lines in the sand that say exactly what we do and don’t stand for.

We serve multiple types of recruitment, we sell globally, we sell to companies of all sizes - TBH there are few instances where we’d say “nah, we’re not for you.” It’s great from a revenue perspective, but over the long run I think the lack of standing for something or being for someone is going to commoditize us if we don’t get ahead of this sooner or later.

Meanwhile over at Affect, I’ve learned from this + am running toward that exact problem as something I don’t want to have be an issue for me.

When I first started thinking about bringing this funnel/revenue diagnostic + way to empower marketers to do the work we know works, we just can’t always prove it with hard numbers, from that alone I was able to start to see who Affect would (and wouldn’t) be for. So I leaned into that + started dumping thoughts into a journal using myself as the exact ICP of who I’d want to be a user.

What did I believe was wrong with marketing today?
What was I frustrated by?
What was I unable to prove today because I didn’t have the tools to measure my work correctly?
What was I unable to do because I couldn’t “prove” that work despite knowing it was exactly what needed to be done if we wanted to grow?
How could I translate that into something that company leaders would then understand?

From here, I took a page from Charlie Munger’s book and his use of inversion, deciding to write an anti-manifesto for Affect.

What scenarios were occurring in GTM teams that drove me crazy to witness?
What types of marketers were the ones I’d roll my eyes at?
What “goals” was I seeing in common practice that I knew were not the right goals to be using?

And this led to the anti-manifesto that I have on the website as the first page in the nav bar so there would never be a question about who Affect is (but more importantly, is NOT) for:

Affect is not for everyone.
It’s not for the marketer who wants to play it safe. The marketer who hides behind complexity because accountability is uncomfortable. The marketer who needs a 37-slide deck to explain their attribution model in order to protect their “seat” at the table.
It’s not for the marketer who celebrates hitting their MQL target in the same quarter the company missed revenue and sees that as the sales team’s problem, not theirs.
It’s not for the marketer who optimizes for cost-per-lead because it’s easy to measure and easy to report, knowing full well it has nothing to do with whether the business grows or not.
It’s not for the marketer who thinks activity and impact are the same thing. The marketer who builds complex reports + dashboards to look data-driven instead of being revenue-driven. The marketer who has convinced themselves that the complexity of their strategy + tech stack is a proxy for the quality of their thinking.
It’s not for the marketer who waits for their marketing tools to tell them what to do next.
It’s not for the marketer who, when asked how much pipeline or revenue marketing generated last quarter, starts off by saying “It depends…” and goes on to change the subject 15 seconds later.
Those marketers exist — there are plenty of them out there, and they’re well-served by the tools built for people who’d rather look busy doing something that doesn’t matter than take on a challenge + be held accountable. Those tools will always have a market.
But this one won’t serve them. We built ours for another type of marketer.
Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated hitting its targets while the business missed revenue and felt sick about it.
The marketers who want to be held accountable because they’re confident enough in their work to drive the business outcomes leadership is focused on.
The marketers who understand that conviction is a choice and being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.
The marketers with backbones.
Those marketers are ours.

Once I had that anti-manifesto down, I had my guardrails set for what I did want Affect to be oriented toward. Being able to speak to why it exists, laying out a scenario that I know most every marketer has been in + felt, hitting the question “how can you prove what you’re doing is working?” that we get every day straight on, and closing with a statement that ties it all together as it weaves the company’s name, Affect, in as a verb + demonstrating that the name is not just a name, but the aspirational state every marketer wants to find themselves in - positively affecting the business they’re in.

There’s a moment every B2B marketer knows.
You’re sitting in a quarterly business review. Sales leadership stands up first. They missed the revenue target again. The team was working hard, but the results just weren’t there.
Then marketing leadership stands up. Announces they’ve had another strong quarter, surpassing the MQL target yet again.
And nobody in that room says a damn word.
Nobody questions how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just move on, accepting it as completely normal.
I sat in that room early in my career and it’s something I’ve never been able to forget.
That moment is B2B marketing in a single scene. A room full of smart marketers celebrating a “goal” that had nothing to do with the business’s growth. They simply optimized for a measure (MQLs) instead of a result, and as Goodhart’s Law says, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Well, marketing has been breaking that law for years.
We chase leads instead of revenue because we don’t trust that we can prove the connection. We spend more on channels we can “measure” poorly and less on ones we can’t measure at all, despite knowing they’re impactful, simply because a flawed metric feels safer when put in front of Finance. The industry has been making money off that complexity for decades and most of us have gone along with it because everyone else has.
BUT, the marketers who’ve made outsized impacts within their companies never bought into that. They had conviction.
They knew what their funnel was actually doing, not what the platforms reported. They knew their conversion rates, the company target, and what needed to occur to get them from where they were to where they needed to be. And because they could prove it, they were trusted. Their results spoke for themselves.
When you can walk into the board room and say, “Here’s where we are today, here’s what’s driving it, here’s where we need to be, and here’s how we’re going to get there” — and have the receipts to back every word of it — the dynamic in that room completely shifts. Leadership stops questioning your budget. Finance starts asking what they can provide to help get you there sooner. All of this because you’ve given them the one thing marketing has been failing to deliver for thirty years:
Trust.
My family has been in advertising for three generations. TV, print, and radio were the primary channels — some of the hardest to “prove” channels when we think about today’s attribution models. When I asked my Dad how he responded to his clients when they’d inevitably ask if what he was doing was working, he replied with one word:
Sales.
That answer still hasn’t changed. We’ve just spent thirty years pretending it has.
Affecting your business means operating with the confidence that what you’re doing is working and being able to prove it every month + every quarter as the ecosystem shifts around you. This path is harder to take, but one thing I can promise you is that it doesn’t end with you celebrating a metric that doesn’t matter in a conference room while the company misses its revenue target.
Affect exists for the marketers who want to be a force on the business, not just a function within it.

My final thought

Most companies will never write a manifesto (remember, I’m in this bucket as well right now at my “day” job…). Leadership will say it’s too limiting + eliminates potential TAM. Legal will say it’s too risky and we’ll be called out online for it. And as a result, these companies will slowly drift further and further into the commodity zone.

But for the companies that recognize this is where the new moats are being created + where lifetime customers will be acquired, this is seriously undervalued property right now. Stop being a marketer for one minute + be a buyer. What companies/brands are you drawn to? Why?

I’d be willing to bet that they’re the ones who’ve stood out from the others by having a real POV. That they’re the ones who have been able to show that they truly get you from the way they speak.

This is where the real first-mover advantage is moving forward. Products can be copied + the market overall is usually ok with that since it means cheaper prices for them. But there’s something at the human level when we see someone trying to copy the personality of someone else that just seems…yuck. You can tell it’s just off + disingenous. It repels you from them because their (bad) intentions are very clearly showing - they’re in it for money, not to do something because it’s what they stand for.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

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Borrowed thinking

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 09 May 2026 10:15:50 GMT

When I started my first marketing role, I had two 2-inch binders that contained just about every printable PDF I could get my hands on from Hubspot, Seth Godin, the Content Marketing Institute, Rand Fishkin’s content for Moz, and various other sources. I was an absolute sponge + wanted to learn as much as I could from people who’ve already “solved” the problems I’d be coming up against in my career ahead.

To this day, I think it was one of the most impactful things I did early on as it helped cement a growth mindset into me

…but for all the good that it did, I think it also instilled something in me that took about a decade in marketing to realize was doing me more harm than good:

I was treating all of the answers + playbooks I’d learned from others as dogma without questioning if they were truly the best things to be using in the various scenarios I encountered each day as a marketer.

And now as I’m having fun building Affect on the side, that lesson is hitting me harder than ever.

All of the answers + playbooks out there, while directionally correct, can’t be applied literally for Affect. How I build + define my ICP, the specific messaging I use across various assets, how the product is priced, even how I’ve configured the P&L all require me to stop + think through what elements apply to my situation and which simply won’t work due to any number of reasons.

As I’m going through all of this, I’m seeing this lesson everywhere now. After reflecting on all the books I've read and took notes on over the years + various podcast episodes I’ve saved, I’m seeing that this has been pointed out by authors, founders, leaders, and thinkers MUCH smarter than I am for ~~hundreds~~ thousands of years.

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Borrowed thinking

We’re seeing a TON of this right now with the rise of AI + LLMs.

All of the written-by-LLM giveaways in posts + comments. All of the analyses delivered to us at work with the same LLM formatting + hallucinations/inaccuracies that any individual working at a company would never include. All of the same new growth plays being used by hundreds of companies.

But borrowed thinking isn’t new or unique to this point in time. The binders I mentioned in the first sentence of this essay prove that + every comment-gated post we see today on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc. show this is being done in other ways today as well.

The thing that’s changed is that the effort required to go about this now is near zero. When I was printing off those PDFs early in my career, I had to do research to find the relevant content + credible sources and then skim through to determine if they were going to be applicable for me (or at least something I could learn from + use later). There was some thinking required to get to the borrowed answer.

That’s gone now. And this isn’t exclusive to early-career marketers either. I’ve seen it from individuals at every level of an organization - demand gen specialists running ICP analyses to directors of product marketing doing competitive intel to CEOs building out business plans.

There’s a really interesting psychological element at play here too. There’s a sense of pride in the LLM’s output + wanting to share it with others - “Look at this incredible output that I was able to guide [insert any LLM here] to!” As if the length of the output warrants a gold star since something of that length previously would’ve taken weeks to pull together.

So while we have the person who generated this output thinking they just solved world hunger, the person/people they’re sending it to are thinking, “Great, another 30-page AI analysis that I’m going to have to sift through while trying not to write it off as soon as I come across the second inaccuracy I see that any team member would never make.”

The output looks good - the formatting, structure, etc. all visually looks good, but the more we dig in and go one or two levels deeper into something, the house of cards it’s built on falls apart.

And herein lies the problem with borrowed thinking: the person who’s doing the borrowing never had a proper “conversation” with the thinking they borrowed. They took it at face value + applied it with zero modifications to their circumstances. So not only do you end up with a strategy or direction that, while the overall heading may be right, the actual path is the wrong one + leads somewhere else entirely.

”In a world where anyone can look up information online, it’s deceptively easy to gain ‘knowledge.’ You can get pretty confident by reading everything you can get your hands on about a certain subject, it’s called ‘artificial maturity.’ But knowing about how to do something and having practical experience actually doing something are radically different.”
- Chop Wood Carry Water, by Joshua Medcalf

What makes this even more dangerous is that it creates a “confidence” gap that’s completely invisible to the generator. The more polished the output looks or sounds, the more convinced the generator is that the thinking underneath it is perfect.

To use Joshua Medcalf’s term above, this is “artificial maturity” at scale. We have individuals or entire companies that are now able to present the appearance of strategic thinking + execution through their analyses + frameworks, but haven’t actually done the work of understanding what fed those. The ironic (and slightly terrifying) thing about this is that the recipients of all of these outputs aren’t being fooled, as they can see through it - it’s that it fools the people generating it into thinking they have a true understanding of what they’re creating.

“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy.”
- The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

The cost of not being forced to think

Following a playbook works great…until it stops working.

The ironic part of this is that when the playbook stops working, or its efficacy starts to diminish, the playbook still isn’t questioned. We immediately jump to the execution of it as the most likely culprit + dump more resources into it such as more budget or more hours worked on it. Or worse, we might do something like go look for someone who’s “better” at running the playbook, or find the latest + greatest tool that “optimizes” it for us.

It couldn’t possibly be the playbook that’s the problem because it’s THE playbook. It’s our holy grail - it came from Hubspot + has been working for all these years after all.

“You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after.”
- Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Coram

This is what Boyd was speaking to in the above quote, that we need to be constantly revisiting whether the playbook/strategy/etc. we’ve adopted still applies. If you or your team ever finds yourself defending something + when pushed for why, you aren’t sure of the initial why the decision was made to go in this direction or who even made the decision - that’s a troubling sign.

”One reason was that rocket components were subject to hundreds of specifications and requirements mandated by the military and NASA. At big aerospace companies, engineers followed these religiously. Musk did the opposite: he made his engineers question all specifications. This would later become step one in a five-point checklist, dubbed “the algorithm,” that became his oft-repeated mantra when developing products. Whenever one of his engineers cited “a requirement” as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering “The military” or “The legal department” was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. “We would talk about how we were going to qualify an engine or certify a fuel tank, and he would ask, ‘Why do we have to do that?’” says Tim Buzza, a refugee from Boeing who would become SpaceX’s vice president of launch and testing. “And we would say, ‘There is a military specification that says it’s a requirement.’ And he’d reply, ‘Who wrote that? Why does it makes sense?’” All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.”
- Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson

Then on the other side of this, you have countless examples from history of companies + individuals who failed to adapt because their previous success had them holding onto their dogmatic playbook for far too long. We see this all the time in huge companies, the ones that almost seem too big to fail, and it proves that it has nothing to do with a lack of resources.

”The person who is the star of a previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to the logic of a strategic inflection point and tends to fall harder than most.”
- Only the Paranoid Survive, by Andy Grove

We see this in marketing often as well. The CMO who rose through the ranks early in their career running the predictable revenue (lead gen) model and doesn’t come to terms with an ever-growing CAC payback period. The demand gen manager who has hit their goals over the years from a strong, high-volume email marketing program, but is finding the changes over the past year to email deliverability is drastically decreasing pipeline production from this channel, so they decide to send more emails.

No one is making bad decisions with ill intent here, they’re just doing what they think makes sense based on what they know. And this is where the cracks start to show to understand if we ever really understood what we were doing or if we were simply borrowing someone else’s thinking to get by.

”Never take it for granted that your past successes will continue into the future. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today.”
- The 33 Strategies of War, by Robert Greene

Back to zero

A few years into my career, I was sitting in a quarterly business review + watched something I’ve never forgotten.

Sales leadership stood up first + said they missed their revenue target. The team was working hard but the results weren’t there. Then marketing leadership stood up + said they had another strong quarter. We surpassed the MQL target yet again.

And then nobody said a damn word.

Nobody questioned how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just moved on, acting like this was completely normal. Because to everyone else in that room, it was.

That room is what eventually led me to build Affect. And one thing building Affect has taught me that I’ve come to appreciate is that when you’re starting from scratch, you have the choice to either borrow the thinking (playbooks + strategies) of others, or to go back to first principles + think through everything yourself.

“His years in the jungle gave him experience rare in the trade. Unlike most of his competitors, he understood every part of the business, from the executive suite where the stock was manipulated to the ripening room where the green fruit turned yellow. He was contemptuous of banana men who spent their lives in the North, far from the plantations. Those schmucks, what do they know? They’re there, we’re here!”
- The Fish That Ate the Whale, by Rich Cohen

In the passage above, this was something Samuel Zemurray recognized immediately as he built Cuyamel Fruit Company into the behemoth that it became, overtaking long-time market leader United Fruit Company with this mentality. That by having been in the jungle seeing where the bananas grew, understanding how the local governments worked, experiencing the transportation methods available to them, he was able to uncover opportunities that would become his unique competitive advantages. He opted not to follow the existing “playbook” for the banana industry and reshaped it in his favor to meet the modern world.

”The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. That lets you design what you know - and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good…
When you build a product or service, you make the call on hundreds of tiny decisions each day. If you’re solving someone else’s problem, you’re constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is.
Best of all, this “solve your own problem” approach lets you fall in love with what you’re making. You know the problem and the value of its solution intimately. There’s no substitute for that. After all, you’ll (hopefully) be working on this for years to come. Maybe even the rest of your life. It better be something you really care about.”
- Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

After sitting in that QBR years ago + seeing variations of it play out over my career, this all led me to the creation of Affect. Or to the point made in Rework above, creating a product that I wanted to use because I was my own ICP. I’d immediately be able to recognize if the strategy + playbook were working because the feedback loop is near instant. I think > I build > I ship > I use > I ask.

“Whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.”
- Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Coram

Same problem, new clothes

I said it a few weeks ago + I’ll say it again: we come across the same problems all the time, they just put on different clothes each time they show up.

This became even more clear to me while pulling together this week’s essay as all of the various authors, founders, leaders, + thinkers who came to this same conclusion have done so from entirely different domains, era, and situations. When you have individuals such as a stoic emperor, a fighter pilot, a banana man, a manufacturing consultant, and a fiction writer all arriving at the same place, you know there’s truth there.

Borrowed thinking is far from a modern problem + it’s not a “problem” in any sense, it’s simply part of the human experience. As Robert Greene put it:

”The world is full of people looking for a secret formula for success and power. They do not want to think on their own; they just want a recipe to follow…They want these steps spelled out for them by an expert or a guru. Believing in the power of imitation, they want to know exactly what some great person has done before.”
- The 33 Strategies of War, by Robert Greene

But the underlying problem with this is, to continue Robert Greene’s analogy, when the recipe is followed without understanding why a certain amount of an ingredient is used, or why one type of flour is used instead of another, that while the recipe is then known to us, it’s not understood by us. As John Graham shared:

"Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it."
- Letters from a Self-Made Merchant, John Graham

The fun in writing this essay here is that I get to look back on the past 15 years + see this all laid out on a timeline. The two 2-inch binders I filled in that first year of my marketing career with “borrowed thinking” gave me theory. All of the years since then have given me practice. As I’m now building Affect, I’m watching years of theory + years of practice finally come together to devise the strategy for bringing it to life + create my own unique playbook for the stage it’s currently at.

Reflecting on the hundreds of companies I’ve analyzed or helped over the years, and then the countless other companies I’ve watched from the outside, I’m realizing this is the work that most of us are guilty of taking shortcuts on. We could do the analyses, the hours of research, the brainstorming of messaging + positioning, etc., but when there’s thinking sitting right in front of us that’s ready to be borrowed and is close enough…well, it’s hard not to use it.

And Ayn Rand put it in words you feel deep in your bones because of the blunt truth it holds:

“The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.”
- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

AI didn’t create this problem as it’s been around for centuries. What it has done is make the subordination described above by Rand frictionless. It’s never been easier to borrow thinking - it’s literally just a single prompt away.

I’d love to jump on my high horse and say I’ve never done this, but as I’ve been building Affect, it forces me to confront that choice daily as there's always a prompt response or a LinkedIn playbook that's close enough. But close enough is how we end up running the same strategy as everyone else + then wonder why we aren’t getting differentiated results or building moats from the competition. None of the people I've cited in this essay achieved the results they did by taking the close enough option. They got there by doing the harder thing - questioning every assumption, going back to first principles, + executing in a way that was authentic to them.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

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The unsexiest growth lever

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:15:24 GMT

This year I’ve been staring at a ~~daunting~~ ambitious growth goal for us at Loxo. It isn’t unrealistic by any means, but it’s also not a number that we’ll be able to just stumble into. And while I’m a demand gen marketer at heart, I recognize that I can’t keep pouring ad dollars in at the top as time goes on in order to hit these goals.

So this has been the “what’s keeping you up at night?” question for me since we kicked off 2026 back in January. How do I figure out the best way for us to continue to grow without defaulting to the “more” bucket (more ad dollars, more email sends, more webinars, etc.)?

And after taking a step back a few weeks ago to look at the big picture, I have my answer.

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Like (marketing) moths drawn to the (sexy) flame

I’m going to be honest, when I realized what our biggest constraint was, I laughed out loud because of how “simple” it was. The issue was we marketers loveee us some complexity. The really deep, sophisticated, insightful finds that help us justify our existence to the company + marketing team. The ones that have leadership saying things like, “Can you believe Jenny uncovered that huge finding for us! WHAT a great hire she was!”

Whether we like to admit it or not, we marketers love those little ego dopamine hits as those are our equivalent of hitting quota that Sales has or shipping that new product/feature that Engineering has. So we reinforce that pattern by doing more “work” that gets that type of recognition.

But the downside of it is that we FLY past some of the most obvious things staring us in the face that have the most leverage. They aren’t sexy enough. Or we simply assume that they’re working just fine already and we don’t bother to examine them closely.

So as I’ve been looking at our 2026 goal + what we can do to get there, I wanted to put everything in front of myself to understand the “global” marketing system at play. We’ve been optimizing for local maximums in LinkedIn Ads, PLG email nurture sequences, etc. ad nauseam, and while we should absolutely continue to do so, I need to optimize our global maximum. And this meant taking a step back + getting all of the obvious/”simple” data front + center.

The data

Nothing crazy here. Grabbed the following 12 datapoints from the past 2 years of data + YTD so far, then put them in “sequenced” order relative to the funnel.

Variable marketing spend (ad spend, event costs, etc.)
Fully loaded marketing spend (variable spend above + all marketing overhead)
Brand impressions (Google Search Console, Profound, etc.)
Website visits (Google Analytics)
Demo requests (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)
Meetings booked (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)
Discovery attended (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)
Sales qualified opportunities created (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)
SQO pipeline value created (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)
Late-stage opportunities (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)
Closed won deals (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)
New revenue generated (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)

Once I had all of the above, I could quickly see how our global system was performing currently, quarter over quarter, and then compared to industry benchmarks for our go-to-market motion + market we sell to.

While it’s easy to see our own quarterly trends + to think “things are maintaining or slightly deviating from normal” and be ok with that is easy to be lulled into. That’s why I like to pull in industry benchmarks to see if my “normal” is actually better, worse, or on par with what’s expected. (note: yes, every company has its own nuances and benchmarks are “averages” BUT for something like this, we’re looking for directional data, not data that should be taken as dogmatic)

Once I laid out all of that data and put in calculations for conversion rates between stages, cost pers, etc., that’s where the obviousness of the constraint I need to focus on became apparent. Here’s an example of the output using dummy data to give you a sense for how I visualized this:

Dummy data for illustrative purposes

The most obvious constraint

In the above example, there’s a fair bit of yellow/red for performance relative to benchmarks. When I was looking at my data here at Loxo, our “sales” funnel is pretty healthy, lots of green, so the most obvious constraint jumped out at me for two reasons:

It was the only “red” one, telling me I was 10%+ off industry benchmarks
It was the one area I haven’t put any resources toward during my 3+ years here at Loxo with real intentionality

So what is this “mysterious” yet super obvious constraint that I’m now smacking myself in the back of the head for not realizing sooner? Our visit → demo requests conversion rate.

And why do I secretly love that this is our biggest constraint right now?

As mentioned a moment ago, we haven’t done much of anything here in a methodical way, so we have the full range of website conversion rate optimization plays at our disposal to start running through
There is SO MUCH LEVERAGE at this constraint. With this being so “high” in our funnel, if we were to take the rate from 1.0% to 1.5%, that then improves every single number below it. Here’s how that would play out in an example model:

Crazy right? Going from a “small” 1% to a 1.5% conversion rate in getting visitors to go to the demo request page (50% increase overall), cascades that 50% down through the rest of the funnel.

50% more demo requests
50% more SQOs created
50% more qualified pipeline
50% more deals won
50% more revenue generated

^^ me, geeking/nerding out at the upside of this kind of opportunity.

Think about it, where else can you get this type of leverage? Certainly not from adding a couple thousand more ad dollars to a campaign or hiring a few more BDRs.

All of this because I zoomed out to look at the big picture + think from a boring systems lens instead of a “sexy” channel lens.

This is what the theory of constraints is really about. It’s finding the one constraint that, when removed, cascades improvement through the entire system. It might not be the sexiest one or the most sophisticated thing in the world, but it’s the one with the most leverage. We’re quick to be seduced by complexity because it “feels” like mastery + as mentioned earlier, any chance to flaunt those “master-level” skills, we’re quick to jump at. But real mastery is seeing the lever with the highest upside for opportunity behind it, sexy or simple.

Here's one thing I'm curious about - what's your “yellow” or “red” rate? Where’s your biggest opportunity to apply leverage toward that? If you’re like me, it may be the one you've been flying past because it doesn't feel sophisticated enough to spend time on, but is well worth digging into.

Book quote of the week

“Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.”
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, by Eric Jorgenson

See you next Saturday,
Sam

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Nobody built it, so I did

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 10:15:51 GMT

Some of you may have heard me tell this story already, but a few years into my career, I was sitting in a quarterly business review and watched something I never forgot.

Sales leadership stood up first + said they missed their revenue target. The team was working hard but the results weren’t there.

Then marketing leadership stood up + said they had another strong quarter. We surpassed the MQL target yet again (woohoo…).

And then nobody said a damn word.

Nobody questioned how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just moved on, acting like this was completely normal and ok.

I’ve never been able to stop thinking about that room. How weird it was to be in that room when it was “normal” to everyone else in there. Then when I made my way over to Refine Labs I finally had a place where the team agreed “nah, that’s messed up and not how businesses should operate.” I’ve watched versions of that scene play out with countless clients, peers, and board horror stories for fifteen years. All incredibly smart people with good intentions + wanting to succeed, but they were unknowingly optimizing for the wrong thing because the wrong thing was what the system rewarded.

The thought that kept creeping in

The more I learned + experienced how marketing actually works, from ecosystems to force multipliers to the way a BDR call lands completely differently when the prospect has been consuming your content for months, the more I kept having this thought that our measurement frameworks seemed to be answering a different question than the one we were (or should’ve been) asking.

Every attribution tool I’ve ever used answers things like “what did each channel do?” or “who gets credit for this deal?” This leads to budgets being dictated by local maximums within channels, not a global maximum for your GTM team.

And that’s because nobody built a tool for the person who owns this outcome. The VP of Marketing, the Head of Sales, and the CFO + CEO all need to answer a completely different question: is our system working? Where is it broken? What do we do about it?

I’ve audited 100+ funnels over my career + keep finding the same patterns over and over. That’s the beauty of pattern recognition - when you can spot the same leaks, the same misdiagnoses, the same confident optimization of the wrong thing, and the same lack of outcome. That’s why we’re left giving a very wishy-washy answer to the board when they ask which channel should get more budget to hit growth targets, meanwhile the real problem is a constraint that, when “more” is added to it, only leads to more firedrills and missed targets.

If you give a mouse a cookie…

This newsletter has been the place where I’ve been working through various ideas publicly for the past few years. Some of you have been here since the beginning + for that I’m forever grateful. (and you also probably know my love of cookies, so I couldn’t help myself with the heading for this section 🤷‍♂️)

I’ve shared my thoughts on ecosystems vs. channels, AKA the argument that force multipliers don’t exist inside individual channels, that they exist in the interplay between them.

You’ve read my thoughts on being data-driven vs. data-informed, why one of the worst things you can do is disqualify a lead simply because it’s a junior title who submitted the demo request, and how most of our “goals” aren’t really goals at all.

What I didn’t tell you is that while I was writing all of that, I was also pulling the thread that leads us here to today.

The thread was a simple question: if measurement is this broken, why hasn’t anyone fixed it? What are we missing that’s making this so hard to solve for?

Meanwhile, I was reading various books + across different genres as I have been for years. Manufacturing books from 1984, biographies of people who built things in completely different domains, economics papers, the list goes on. One thing I didn’t read much of though were marketing books. I’ve read enough of those over the years to know those rarely ever get to a meaningful depth + are typically just platitudes we already know.

One of the first “aha” moments I had came from a line in the manufacturing book for 1984 (Eliyahu Goldratt’s “The Goal”) which is a novel about a manufacturing plant + their struggles. Here’s the part that stopped me in my tracks:

“The contribution of any single person to the organization’s purpose is strongly dependent upon the performance of others.”

So I read the line again. Then I replaced “person” with [channel, campaign, team, program, etc.] and realized that’s the ecosystem + force multiplier argument I’ve been making.

The problems we think are new aren’t new. They’re the same problems we’ve always had, just dressed in different clothes.

The next thread

A few months later, I was reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant + came across his framing of the principal-agent problem. He called it the single most fundamental problem in microeconomics, but as you’re about to see, I realized it was the answer to something else we marketers have been struggling with.

Basically, the principal is the person who owns the outcome. Then the agent is the person acting on their behalf. The underlying problem he described is that agents optimize for what the principal can measure — not for the outcome itself.

I about threw my book across the room after reading that. Was a very real moment where I felt like I finally had a justification that I wasn’t crazy for going down the Goodhart’s Law rabbithole that I’d been going down lately. He framed up the entire problem with B2B marketing measurement, but using an economic concept.

The board asks us which channel is working because that’s what they can measure. So the marketing team optimizes for cost per lead on that channel because that’s what they’re rewarded by the board for. Plus, attribution tools are built to show what each agent (i.e. each channel, campaign, person, etc.) contributed toward that. Yay for credit assignment + local optimizations!

Nobody is building for the principal in the above scenarios. The person or leadership team who owns the revenue outcome + needs to understand the system as a whole in order to see where the constraints are and what to do about them. Zero help for this person/team.

So we ultimately have things like Goodhart’s Law, the principal/agent problem, and the theory of constraints all coming together in a perfect storm here. Three very different frameworks from three very different disciplines all pointing to the exact same problem.

There’s no coincidence here. As I said earlier - same problems, just wearing different clothes. Lucky for us, we know what’s really underneath those clothes thanks to these problems already having been solved, so it’s just been a matter of time to translate that to our domain.

So I kept waiting for someone to build the tool that fills that gap. And waiting. Anddd waiting some more. But nothing ever came. Attribution tools have been evolving, but not in this direction.

So I built it instead.

What is it?

Affect is a revenue diagnostic for B2B marketers and revenue leaders. It diagnoses exactly where your funnel is breaking, benchmarks your rates against real peers in your industry, and tells you what to fix first.

You run a free audit in three minutes + it benchmarks your conversion rates. It tells you where you stand relative to your industry, GTM motion, and maturity. Then it diagnoses what’s actually wrong with your funnel - a real, specific diagnosis based on your inputs. It names the root cause, gives you a prioritized action plan, + then a library of 50+ plays with timelines and success signals that you can take to improve your numbers.

Imagine you went to the doctor with chronic stomach pains and at each visit they just told you “take more pills,” but those stomach pains never got better. You’d start to question their credibility after 2–3 visits. Meanwhile, what you’re really trying to understand is why you have those stomach pains in the first place. You don’t want the band-aid solution of taking more pills to mask the pain.

This is the cycle we marketers have been in for decades. It’s time to break it.

You’re the first to hear this

This is the first place I’m publicly announcing that Affect is live. It’s a fully functioning app (well, as fully-functioning as can be at initial release 😉) + I’m already using it myself.

It’s been fun to build this. One thing that immediately came to light for me when going about this is that I’ve managed to createe a new category. I tried to find market comps for something like this + there’s nothing out there. This has all been done historically through a combination of things like:

Consultant audits that run anywhere from $15-30k
Industry benchmark reports from places like Gartner + cost a couple grand
Having an in-house or fractional marketing leader ($$$ as you know)
Then having some type of agency or internal team member who knows how to measure performance overall (but usually ends up being someone in Finance who definitely does NOT understand marketing and leads to all of those fun ROI conversations…)

So the category “name” of revenue diagnostic, the pricing I’m starting this at, etc. - I’m genuinely curious for your thoughts + feedback. Give it a shot + let me know how you’d explain what it does to a friend or colleague. More curiously, how much value does this give you? I personally know the power of what a 1% improvement to a conversion rate can do to a funnel, but that doesn’t always translate to software purchases.

The first 50 people who sign up as paying customers are going to be given the founding member rate of $99/month for life. One flat rate per entity (AKA unlimited users/teammates) + a rate lock for life (I can’t stand those “your rate is going up at renewal!” emails).

Here’s how I’ve been thinking about pricing for those who are curious.

After the first 50 sign up, the price is going to go up. The people who get in first shape what this becomes + I want those people to be the ones who believed early enough to take the bet.

But if you’re not ready to pay yet, that’s completely ok - just run the free audit first. See what it tells you about your funnel + has you start thinking about. You can come back to it + re-run it as many times as you like as time goes on.

One final note

I’ve spent years waiting for the “right” moment to do something like this, the time when I’d have more certainty to start building. Ultimately, for permission that was never going to come from anywhere/anyone.

The thing that started as a note in my phone didn’t come from some sexy or extravagant business plan or market analysis. It came from reading various books + listening to different podcasts + feeling something click. So I pulled the thread + kept pulling, building the tool I’ve always wanted out of necessity for myself, not from some ulterior motive. Or as Naval Ravikant said, “Find the problem that feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else. You’ll outcompete anyone doing it for the outcome because you’re doing it for the thing itself.”

This is that problem for me.

Your version of this exists somewhere. The problem that feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else + is the thing you keep coming back to. I’m not trying to AI-pill you here, but the bar has never been lower to follow your curiosity in building something. I even mentioned this in last week’s newsletter - products aren’t going to be the moat anymore, the underlying knowledge + experience that you uniquely have is what the market is going to value the most as new entrants flock in left + right.

So have fun, be curious, and go try out Affect :)

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. don’t worry, this newsletter isn’t now going to become me pitching you on Affect every send moving forward. It’s going to continue as it always has, me sharing what I’m seeing + learning while leading marketing here at Loxo, but I may also start sharing some of the things I’m seeing + learning as I work with other marketers who use Affect. Trends, insights, what is/isn’t working, etc. - all the normal stuff you’d expect from me :)

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The 2026 10x moat

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:15:43 GMT

I had a call this past week with a former client from my Refine Labs days. They reached out to gut check something they noticed to see if it was a them thing or a larger trend across the industry.

They’ve been seeing a dip in their site traffic numbers over the past handful of months. Nothing catastrophic by any means, but definitely noticeable. They wanted to understand what was happening. I told them about the alligator effect that’s come about with the increase in AI overviews + LLM searches and the rise of dark SEO + how to understand acquisition performance through this new lens.

Later that night after letting the conversation marinate some more, I realized something that’s been nagging at me for a while + crystallized through that conversation.

No one (in their right mind) wakes up excited or wanting to migrate platforms, especially a core system of record platform. They certainly don’t want to deal with data migrations. Then there’s the whole needing to learn new workflows + training the team on a new platform. It’s all painful + expensive in terms of time + resources. The only reason anyone has done this historically is if what they’re moving to is at least 10x better than what they’re leaving.

And that’s been the unspoken rule of software for years - if you want people to switch, you need to be 10x better. The 10x bar + guarantee of future improved results is what made migrations worth the pain.

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The Times They Are A-Changin’

The barrier to entry for building software is basically gone now thanks to Claude Code, Lovable, Codex, etc. It’s never been easier to build something that works + ship it to market.

The corollary to that means maintaining a true 10x product is harder than ever before. By the time you build something that’s genuinely 10x better, someone else has already copied it + built a 7x alternative that costs half as much. Then someone else copies that + builds a 5x version that’s easier to use. Then another. And another.

I’m watching this play out everywhere. The product moat is collapsing in real-time. And with this collapse comes a race to the bottom on pricing. When product/feature differentiation becomes marginal, the next lever is almost always price.

BUT - here’s one thing I’ve noticed with the companies that are actually winning in this environment + holding their ground as commoditized versions are popping up around them left + right:

They’re shifting the focus of their 10x factor from their product to the underlying knowledge infrastructure it’s built on top of.

Playbooks
Proprietary research
Frameworks for how to actually execute + get results
The community of users + UGC content from them

In short: the type of expertise that can’t be replicated by code or copied by a competitor in a weekend.

When someone uses to their platform, yes, the product is good, but what they’re really paying + staying for is the underlying knowledge + expertise that comes with it. The guidance that comes from the employees + community of users. More impactfully, the “oh yeah, we’ve seen that scenario play out before - here’s why that’s happening + here’s what does/doesn’t work to get through it.”

THAT is the stuff that makes moving platforms worth it now.

Anyone can copy a ~~feature~~ product in a month. But it’s really hard to copy the knowledge + insights gained from someone who has spent years in the space gaining the type of experience you can only get from first-principles thinking + execution.

Let the market copy your dashboards + features. Let them put on your clothes + dance around trying to tell the market that they’re the same as you, just a little more affordable. Because when push comes to shove + they start to get the hard questions like “why am I not getting the results your platform claimed I’d get?”, they’ll be standing there at a loss for words, because they never learned the fundamentals or gained the underlying knowledge for what the platform is actually solving for + how to execute the proper strategy from it.

You can’t build the frameworks that show people how to get 3x better results with it.

The new 10x

Most companies are still playing the old game. They’re trying to out-engineer their way to differentiation. Ship a better feature, add a new automation, etc. It’s the 10x product game + they’re losing because the that game is over.

The companies breaking ahead right now are playing the knowledge game.

This is especially important if you’re someone building something on the side thinking you have a shot at the market. You don’t need to out-build anyone. Or even if you do, expect that others are going to quickly follow suit and that moat will be gone within a few months.

BUT, you can out-think them.

What do you know that no one else knows?
What have you seen work that competitors don’t fundamentally understand?
What frameworks have you developed that the market can’t get anywhere else?
What patterns have you noticed that, if codified + shared, would be genuinely useful?

This is the real 10x. This is the new moat.

Most of you reading this are working at a company that’s already established in the market. Over the past year you’ve probably been watching new competitors pop up every month + the same thing applies here. It’s going to become harder + harder to win by having a slightly better product. But you can continue to win by being the most trusted advisor + authority in the space - AKA the ones who actually know how to help your customers succeed in driving the results they’re after.

So instead of spending all your time thinking about how to market new features, spend it on knowledge capture. What are your customers actually doing that’s working? What’s not working? What patterns are you seeing in the market? Take that + turn it into playbooks, frameworks, training sessions, etc.

My hypothesis is that over the coming year, there’s going to be a shift that starts to take place where we do less marketing of the product and more marketing of the thinking/knowledge/experience that comes with the product.

Positioning is going to shift from “we’re the #1 product in [category]” to “we have the knowledge + expertise to help those in [category] win + we’re going to teach you how.”

The knowledge you have that makes your customers 10x better at what they’re trying to do is going to be the new 10x rule.

Product is table stakes now - anyone can build one in a weekend. The true moat is the underlying thinking + knowledge.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

A quick note from me:

Everything I just wrote about above - about how the moat has shifted from product to knowledge - I’ve been living this while building Affect over the past handful of months.

I (someone with zero coding skills) built a platform in a few months that I’m sure someone else can/will replicate in a weekend. But like I wrote about above - the code isn’t the moat, the underlying knowledge is.

Affect isn’t just software. It’s the framework for how I think about marketing accountability. The playbooks I’ve built from 15 years of seeing what works + what doesn’t. The underlying conviction that marketing’s job isn’t to hit vanity metrics - it’s to move the business.

Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated hitting its MQL targets while the business missed revenue. For the marketers who want to be held accountable because they’re confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself. For the marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.

The waitlist is open today + the product will be coming out of beta in a few weeks. It would mean a lot to have you on it 🙏

Join the waitlist

Letter to the future CMO

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:15:41 GMT

There’s a moment every B2B marketer knows.

You’re sitting in a quarterly business review. Sales leadership stands up first. They missed the revenue target again. The team was working hard, but the results just weren’t there.

Then marketing leadership stands up. Another strong quarter. Surpassed the MQL target yet again.

And nobody in that room says a damn word. Nobody questions how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just move on.

I sat in that room early in my career and it’s something I’ve never been able to forget.

15 years later, I’ve done something about this. I built Affect - the platform I’ve always wished for as a marketer.

Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated hitting its targets while the business missed revenue - and felt sick about it.
The marketers who want to be held accountable because they’re confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself.
The marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.

The waitlist is open today. It would mean a lot to have you on it 🙏

Join the waitlist

My dear future CMO,

This final letter is different.

The first four I wrote to you came from a place of having lived it - the mistakes, the lessons, + the moments where I wish someone had handed me letters like these. But this letter is written from a different vantage point as I haven’t sat in this seat. I’ve watched enough people who have been there to know what I’d want to be thinking about before I got there.

So take this one for what it is - observations from someone still on their way up, written down before the moment arrives.

The first thing that will catch you off guard is that the job is less about marketing than you think.

At every level before this one, your value was tied to your ability to understand + execute marketing. At the CMO level, what actually matters is your ability to translate marketing into language the business cares about. Things like impressions, brand lift, and keyword clusters don’t mean anything outside of your marketing team.

The table you’re sitting at now is discussing revenue, margins, market position, + advancing your competitive advantage. If you can’t make that transition fluently + quickly, you’ll have a short tenure fighting for budget + credibility instead of actually leading.

And then there’s the fun part that makes it even harder - you’re almost certainly the most misunderstood executive in the room. The CFO has their financial model + the CRO has their revenue number, two very quantitative measures with binary over/underperforming metrics. The CMO has a qualitative story about why the market sees you the way it does, what it’ll take to change that, + some hypothetical models for what the outcome could look like.

Getting the room to receive that story as strategy rather than opinion is work that never stops. You’ll educate as much as you execute. Then you’ll re-educate again in a few quarters when something is “off” and the lesson has been forgotten because it never showed up cleanly in any report. This is the job now. You need to be able to market internally just as well, if not better, than you can market externally.

A second lesson: your relationships will determine everything.

Your relationship with the CEO is the foundation your entire role is built on - more than your strategy, your team, + the quality of your work. If the CEO doesn’t understand what you’re building + why it’ll work, you’ll always be one bad quarter away from having “the conversation” that no CMO wants to have. Invest in this relationship like it’s the most important project on your list.

Then there’s a second relationship most CMOs underestimate - the one with the CFO. These two functions have historically talked past each other - marketing speaks in qualitative measures, finance speaks in quantitative measures. The CMOs who figure out how to close that gap early are the ones who end up with more budget, more trust, + more room to make the big bets. You are the person who will determine if marketing is viewed as an expense or an investment.

And for your final lesson: you’re going to make a lot of decisions in this seat. Hundreds, if not thousands, of calls across strategy, budget, people, execution, messaging, positioning, + much more. But when you + others look back on your tenure, you’ll likely be defined by only one or two of those decisions: that one big swing that really worked, and then the one bet that completely flopped. It won’t be the sum of everything you did. That’s the strange one to sit with, but it’s worth thinking about now before you get there. It will inform how seriously you treat the biggest calls + how much conviction you’re willing to bring to them.

You’ll be sitting with a lot of things alone at this level. There’s nobody above you in marketing inside the company to learn from or bounce ideas around with anymore. The peers who used to be your sounding board are now your direct reports. You’ll have to be the person in the room who says the hard thing nobody else will say - whether it’s about the strategy, the market, what’s not working, or who isn’t pulling their weight. This is a burden that is yours alone. It comes with the seat.

You’ll skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.

Ever faithfully yours,
Sam

P.S. If this helped with where you’re at now, or would have when you were at this stage, share this with someone else you know who would benefit from it.

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Editor’s note: This is letter 5 of 5 in a series of letters to a marketer at a major inflection point in their career - the letters I wish I had at those times. If you want to start at the beginning, here they are:
To the first-year marketer
To the first-time manager
To the first-time director
To the first-time VP

*AI disclaimer: stealing this from Ashley Lewin. It’s important to be transparent when it comes to AI usage in marketing. You all (hopefully) trust me + let me drop into your inbox each week, and I don’t want you to think I take that for granted.
I used AI for this week’s newsletter (and the others in this series) to help structure the writing in a way that allows me to be shorter, more direct, + have more of a “lessons + love from someone who’s been there” dynamic to it. I’m sure you picked up on that in the writing style here. My ideas, but in a slightly different style + delivery than normal in an effort to make this series more impactful.

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Letter to the first-time VP

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 10:15:15 GMT

There’s a moment every B2B marketer knows.

You’re sitting in a quarterly business review. Sales leadership stands up first. They missed the revenue target again. The team was working hard, but the results just weren’t there.

Then marketing leadership stands up. Another strong quarter. Surpassed the MQL target yet again.

And nobody in that room says a damn word. Nobody questions how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just move on.

I sat in that room early in my career and it’s something I’ve never been able to forget.

15 years later, I’ve done something about this. I built Affect - the platform I’ve always wished for as a marketer.

Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated hitting its targets while the business missed revenue - and felt sick about it.
The marketers who want to be held accountable because they're confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself.
The marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.

The waitlist is open today. It would mean a lot to have you on it 🙏

Join the waitlist

My dear first-time VP of Marketing,

Congratulations. You own the marketing department now.

But I want to be direct with you about what this actually means.

Everything that happens inside the marketing department is on you now. Missing the pipeline this quarter isn’t your demand gen manager’s fault, it’s yours. The event you hosted that fell flat isn’t your event marketer’s fault, it’s yours. The product launch that didn’t drive as many handraisers as forecasted isn’t your product marketer’s fault, it’s yours. When things work, the individuals on your team get the credit. When things don’t work, you own it, that’s on you for not driving the result.

This is what it means to actually lead a department. The VPs who struggle at this level are the ones who point their finger when things go wrong. The VPs who grow fast + make it past the 18-month mark understand early that the buck stops with them. You know exactly what your job is. Now you need to drop any semblance of an ego + get ready to take a few jabs to the mouth as these are the requirements to long-term success at this level.

The next thing to learn is how to build a departmental strategy that works.

I told you about ecosystems in a previous letter. In your first marketing role, the idea was simple: don’t measure channels in isolation. In your first manager role, it was about evaluating whether inputs were doing anything to the output. At the director level, it was about building a brand coefficient that makes everything else better.

At the VP level, ecosystems goes from being a philosophy to an operating system.

You’re now making decisions that determine how the GTM motion fits together - where to apply budget, how the teams are structured, which big bets get made, and more difficult, where cuts need to be made. Viewing performance through the lens of individual channels doesn’t work at this level. You’re juggling too many balls at once. The question for you is “how is this channel affecting everything else in our GTM ecosystem?”

A BDR team that looks expensive in isolation might actually be the mechanism that drives the majority of your PLG signups to successfully activate + adopt through their follow up. The podcast that is “unattributable” might be why your win rates have been steadily rising. You have to hold the whole system in your head + make decisions at that level.

But most VPs don’t. They optimize locally because local performance is what’s easiest to prove or defend in a board meeting. Don’t fall into this trap early.

One last thing I want to tell you is about velocity.

At this level, the decisions are the most complex they’ve ever been + the information you have will never be complete. There will always be another data point to gather, another stakeholder to align, another scenario to model, etc. And if you are always waiting until you have “that one last thing,” you’ll always be waiting.

A plan without velocity never gets off the ground. The market doesn’t wait for you to have everything you need to be comfortable. Your competitors certainly won’t be waiting for you to feel ready. You need to learn to move with what you have + be prepared to iterate as you go. Success at this level is making a series of good decisions after good decisions in rapid succession, not one perfect decision made too late.

Nobody is going to give you permission to lead + do this. That’s the job you’re expected to do. You’re the one being looked to for permission now.

Remember: you’ll skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.

Ever faithfully yours,
Sam

P.S. If this helped with where you’re at now, or would have when you were at this stage, share this with someone else you know who would benefit from it.

Editor’s note: This is letter 4 of 5 in a series of letters to a marketer at a major inflection point in their career - the letters I wish I had at those times. If you want to start at the beginning, here they are:
To the first-year marketer
To the first-time manager
To the first-time director

*AI disclaimer: stealing this from Ashley Lewin (if you haven’t subscribed to her newsletter yet, definitely do. ALSO - she just launched her own company, GrowthLine Studio if anyone is looking for some fractional marketing help).
It’s important to be transparent when it comes to AI usage in marketing. You all (hopefully) trust me + let me drop into your inbox each week, and I don’t want you to think I take that for granted.
I used AI for this week’s newsletter (and the others in this series) to help structure the writing in a way that allows me to be shorter, more direct, + have more of a “lessons + love from someone who’s been there” dynamic to it. I’m sure you picked up on that in the writing style here. My ideas, but in a slightly different style + delivery than normal in an effort to make this series more impactful.

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Letter to a first-time director

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:15:39 GMT

A quick note from me before we get into this week’s newsletter:

You know the feeling. The one that comes when pipeline is off. You sense it + are mentally preparing yourself for the knee-jerk reaction your leadership team is going to have when they find out. You have your theories about potential causes. Leadership has theories as well, but more urgently, are telling you to fix this now. So while you spend the next week trying to see what happened, what you actually need is someone to just tell you where the funnel is broken + what to fix first.

I’ve felt that frustration my entire career. I’ve been that marketer more times than I can count. But I’ve finally had enough of it, so I’ve been moonlighting to build the tool I always wished I had.

Affect pinpoints exactly where your funnel is broken, explains the root cause of it, and tells you how to fix it. But diagnosing the problem is only step one. Affect is built to take you all the way from knowing what’s broken to making the changes to fix it to seeing exactly when those changes will hit your top of funnel, pipeline, + revenue. For the first time, you can see your fingerprints on the outcome.

The waitlist is open today. It would mean a lot to have you on it.

→ affect.so

My dear first-time director,

Congratulations. You just got “the” title.

This one is a big step for you, so it’s going to be longer than the last two letters I sent you.

Here’s the thing about titles: they have a sneaky way of trying to become the thing you work toward instead of the continued pursuit of mastery in your craft.

John Boyd would regularly warn his mentees about this trap. His frame was simple and became known as the “to be or to do” speech. You can spend your career trying to “be” someone who gets the titles + accolades, or you can spend your career doing the actual work + making a real difference in your field.

Director is not an identity. It’s a context in which you’re enabled to do more + better work. But the day you start leading with the weight of the title is the day your work starts suffering for it.

Now, something you’re going to be asked to think deeply about at this level that you probably weren’t before: brand.

I’ll save you the “should we invest in brand or demand gen?” debate you’re going to hear in every budget meeting for the rest of your career because it’s the wrong question. Brand + demand aren’t competing. Brand is the coefficient that sits in front of everything else. The same campaign, the same budget, the same BDRs produce different results depending on whether the market knows who you are + their association with you. A strong brand can make mediocre demand gen work better than it should. A weak brand can prevent even the best demand gen work from driving results.

This is going to frustrate you because you can feel your brand’s strength and can communicate that in a meeting with leadership, but they’re going to ask for data that backs this + there’s no single datapoint that “proves” this feeling for you. Don’t let that discourage you.

When a prospect gets on a call already knowing what you do + why it matters, that’s the brand coefficient at work. When a cold email gets a reply because they’ve seen your company’s name three times in the past month, that’s it. It won’t show up cleanly in any attribution model, which is exactly why most directors never fully account for it. You should.

Another thing about this level that nobody prepares you for. Some of your calls you make at this level are going to be wrong. Budget decisions, strategic bets, people decisions - you’re going to realize later on that you got some of them wrong.

This is now a part of the job. What matters is what you do when it happens.

The instinct most people have is to defend their decision. To double down + find reasons why it still might work. Or the opposite - they let it die and place blame elsewhere for why it didn’t work. I’ve watched talented directors lose the trust of their leaders + teams because they couldn’t accept the responsibility of being wrong.

Here’s a distinction worth understanding early: a bad decision and a bad outcome aren’t the same thing. You can make the right call with the information you had + still have it not work. That’s business. Hell, that’s life. What you owe people in that situation is honesty about what happened + clarity on what changes. Learn to own that + say “but here’s what we’re doing about it.”

The directors people trust the most aren’t always right. They’re just the ones who don’t make their mistakes someone else’s problem.

You’ll skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.

Ever faithfully yours,
Sam

P.S. If this helped with where you’re at now, or would have when you were at this stage, share this with someone else you know who would benefit from it.

Editor’s note: This is letter 3 of 5 in a series of letters to a marketer at a major inflection point in their career - the letters I wish I had at those times. If you want to start at the beginning, here they are:
To the first-year marketer
To the first-time manager

Sponsor: HockeyStack

For the past 2 years I’ve been asking myself the same question over + over again:
“What does an ideal GTM ecosystem journey actually look like for our ICP?”

...but I still don’t have a *clear* answer

I know the answer exists + that it’s hiding in our data. I know that if I could actually see it, I could craft our GTM execution around it instead of guessing. But every time I try to piece it together, I get stuck at the same point:

“Are BDRs more successful if they’ve seen ads first?”
“Do the order of activities impact one another?”

So we’re all sitting here with tons of unstructured data that could answer these questions, but don’t have the infrastructure to actually surface the answers we’re after…until now.

HockeyStack launched Blueprints recently + it’s the first tool I’ve seen that finally shows which activities + sequences actually happen when we WIN and what is (or isn’t) happening when we LOSE.

Check it out

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Letter to a first-time manager

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:15:42 GMT

Editor’s note: Over the next month, I’m writing a letter to a marketer at a major inflection point in their career - the letters I wish I had at those times. What follows is the second in this series. If you want to start at the beginning, here they are:
To the first-year marketer

My dear first-time manager,

Congratulations. You just got handed something new: a budget, a direct report, or both.

This is the moment many marketers get it wrong.

The instincts that made you a good individual contributor start working against you here. You were rewarded for doing, for shipping, + for driving results on the channels you owned. Now you’re responsible for a system, and systems don’t work the same way.

The mistake I made + see most often at this stage is what I call the additive mindset. You have a budget + you want to grow pipeline, so you start asking questions like:

What if we added more ad spend? What if we hired another BDR? What if we added this channel?

Then you map out the anticipated ROI of each in isolation, add it to your expected outcomes, and present your plan.

The problem with this is that nothing in a GTM motion works as independent parts. You win deals because of how channels work together - ads that build familiarity, outbound that hits at the right moment, content that gives the prospect something to trust. Remove any one of those + the others become less effective. That’s how an ecosystem operates: a series of complex interdependent parts. Evaluate it that way, not channel by channel.

The biggest learning for you here is watching channels you used to think of as additive become force multipliers for one another. The same budget, but more output because the channels are working together rather than in isolation.

But you only get there if you’re willing to ask an honest question about everything your budget touches: is the input doing anything to the output?

Not by its own metrics or confined to how it’s doing in its isolated platform. I’m talking relative to pipeline + revenue - the numbers that actually matter. I bet you’ll find that some of your highest-performing inputs by their own local measures are doing very little for the actual global result. I’ve cut keywords we “ranked” for + channels that drove “traffic” because when I asked that question honestly, the answer was no.

You’re now a steward of the business’s resources. That means asking that question even when the answer is uncomfortable.

Now, about the person you’re managing.

Every new manager defaults to giving answers. You know the job + you’ve done the job, so telling someone what to do is faster than walking them through it. The problem is that people own what they conclude themselves - they don’t own what you give them. You can’t argue someone into a belief they didn’t reason themselves into, and the same goes for getting someone to truly understand their work. Ask the questions before you give the answers. Let them arrive at it on their own.

Lastly, your team is the most accurate reflection of your standards. What you tolerate, what you push back on, where you set the bar - all of that is what they’ll calibrate to. You let the standard slip the moment you don’t say something when you should have.

Feel it early. The standard slips faster than you think.

You’re going to skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.

Ever faithfully yours, Sam

P.S. If this helped with where you’re at now, or would have when you were at this stage, share this with someone else you know who would benefit from it.

Sponsor: You/Your Company?

If you’re looking to get in front of an engaged audience of some of the savviest marketers + GTM practitioners, this is your opportunity. One opening per month to sponsor this newsletter has become available + I’m sure will claimed quick, so if the audience reading this newsletter is your ICP, this is your chance.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a VP of Marketing + they said they were exploring/in negotiations with one of the sponsors of this newsletter after learning about them here + seeing them as a product that I endorse. That’s the power of these types of partnerships done well (vs. the AI influencer dumpster fire some are experimenting with).

Simply reply back to this email if you/your company is interested or drop me a DM on LinkedIn.

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Letter to a first-year marketer

Sam Kuehnle — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:15:31 GMT

Editor’s note: Over the next 4 weeks, I’m writing a letter to a marketer at a major inflection point in their career - the letters I wish I had at those times. What follows is the first one of a four-part series.

My dear first-year marketer,

Congratulations. You got the job.

Now let me tell you a few things I had to learn the hard way.

Early in my career I sat in a quarterly business review + watched something that hasn’t left me since.

Sales leadership stood up first. Said they had a tough quarter + missed the revenue target again. The team was working hard, but the results just weren’t there.

Then marketing leadership stood up. Another strong quarter + surpassed the MQL target yet again.

And here’s the part that stuck out to me - nobody in that room said a single thing. Nobody questioned how both of these things could be true at the same time.

Growing up an athlete, I was wired a certain way. If you do the right input consistently, you’ll get the result. If you’re not getting the result, you’re either not doing enough of the input, or it’s the wrong input relative to driving that result.

What I was watching in that conference room was the second one.

Marketing had picked an input (MQLs) that wasn’t truly connected to the result (revenue) the business needed. But because marketing was only held accountable to the MQL input, they weren’t incentivized to care what happened after those were generated.

This is Goodhart’s Law in action. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. B2B marketing has been breaking this law for years.

So here’s what I want you to know from day one: leads are not the goal. Revenue is the goal. You should have confidence that the work you’re doing will impact pipeline + revenue. If it isn't, it shouldn't be on your list.

The marketers who figure this out early are the ones that sales actually trusts + the ones leadership calls on when the business has a real problem to solve. That’s a different career than the one that ends with you celebrating in a conference room while the company misses its target.

You’re also going to be handed a playbook.

Question it from day one. Don’t do it loudly (yet), but internally. Ask yourself if this reflects how buyers actually behave, or if it’s how “everyone else is doing it.” Common sense and common practice are almost never the same thing in B2B.

The marketers who figure that out early treat the playbook as a starting point, not dogma. Always use the simplest filter available: would a real buyer actually respond to this?

Last thing, and this one isn’t about marketing at all: do the work because your standard demands it.

Not so you can be seen doing it. Not to prove you were worth hiring. Not to show how “busy” you are.

The right people will notice without you having to make them notice. As John Boyd used to tell his proteges, “If you insist on getting credit for the work you do, you’ll never get far in life. Don’t confuse yourself with the idea of getting credit.”

You’re going to skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.

Ever faithfully yours,
Sam

P.S. if this would’ve helped you early on, it’ll probably help someone you know who’s just getting started

*AI disclaimer: stealing this from Ashley Lewin (if you haven’t subscribed to her newsletter yet, definitely do. ALSO - she just launched her own company, GrowthLine Studio if anyone is looking for some fractional marketing help).
It’s important to be transparent when it comes to AI usage in marketing. You all (hopefully) trust me + let me drop into your inbox each week, and I don’t want you to think I take that for granted.
I used AI for this week’s newsletter (and the 3 that will follow in this series) to help structure the writing in a way that allows me to be shorter, more direct, + have more of a “lessons + love from someone who’s been there” dynamic to it. I’m sure you picked up on that in the writing style here. My ideas, but in a slightly different style + delivery than normal in an effort to make this series more impactful.

Sponsor: HockeyStack

“Are BDRs more successful if they’ve seen ads first?”
“Do the order of activities impact one another?”

So we’re all sitting here with tons of unstructured data that could answer these questions, but don’t have the infrastructure to actually surface the answers we’re after…until now.

Check it out

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to have more like it delivered to your inbox weekly, consider subscribing below (P.S. it’s free)