It's not for everyone
Why companies are scared to pick a side
“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…
Sponsor: HockeyStack
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.
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.
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