I get to make a big announcement today, and I’ve been sitting on it impatiently.

Bryan Eisenberg is opening YouXAI.

If you’ve been in marketing long enough, that name needs no introduction: Bryan and his brother Jeffrey coined the term “conversion rate optimization” back when most companies didn’t have a website worth optimizing.

Eleven books. Two million published words. Columns in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Thirty years spent understanding why people say yes online.

That’s the man who walks onto our stage first on September 12 in Waco.

And it’s more than a big name on a poster. When I interviewed Bryan for the speaker preview series, he told me something disarming: everything he spent 30 years mastering can now be generated for free by AI.

Instead of flinching, he rebuilt his whole operation around the one thing that survived. That conversation is below - and don’t skip the part about the job listings that beat an industry with 80% turnover.

The summit is in Waco, Saturday, Sept. 12th, 8am to 5 PM. Early-bird tickets only $59 until July 31. Register below:

Grab your early bird tix!

Bryan Eisenberg has spent 30 years getting good at something that just became free.

He and his brother Jeffrey coined the term “conversion rate optimization” before most marketers knew there was a science to it.

They published two million words across eleven books, wrote columns for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and built an entire professional identity around understanding how to persuade people online.

It is, by any measure, hard-won expertise.

And in a preview conversation ahead of his opening keynote at YouXAI, September 12, in Waco, Bryan said the quiet part out loud: none of that scarcity protects him anymore. Anyone can generate the content he spent decades learning to write.

Every technology that ever mattered did the same thing

Bryan’s framing for this moment isn’t really about AI. It’s about friction, and the long history of technology removing it.

“What happens in each step of those, there’s friction that got removed that makes it easier for people to publish,” he said, walking through the sequence: hand-scribed books, then the printing press, then radio licenses, then a handful of TV channels, then a million streaming services, then the democratized internet.

Every step, the barrier to putting out content dropped.

“And so when you kind of inverse that, there’s no friction. In all persuasive momentum, there’s two things that you gotta work on.”

Today, he said, that friction has hit zero. “You can generate print, you can generate pictures artificially, you can generate videos now, automatically. Zero friction.”

Which leaves exactly one variable that still separates one piece of content from a million identical ones: motivation.

And the only motivation that survives zero friction, Bryan argued, is human connection. “That trust factor only happens between real humans.”

This is the exact inversion the YouXAI thesis is built on. When the technical barrier disappears, the differentiator stops being technical and becomes personal — the specific, unautomatable fact of who you are and who trusts you.

The system: one recording, five outputs, zero manual labor

Bryan didn’t leave this as theory. He built the actual production line.

Every Friday, he records one or two guests for his podcast — a show with a 12-to-15-week publishing lag long enough that, by his own admission, “I barely remember what we discussed during the podcast.”

When an episode nears publication, the old process meant manually finding the YouTube video, copying the transcript, pulling clips through a separate tool, and then writing a blog post for his podcast’s home, a separate post for his personal site, a LinkedIn post, and posts for Instagram and Facebook. Each one, by hand, one platform at a time.

“I have now automated every single one of those steps,” Bryan said, “including the initial draft of both our blog posts. But it’s doing that in a very humanized voice.”

That last clause is the whole point. He didn’t build a system that produces generic AI content across five channels. He built a system that produces his voice across five channels, faster than he could type it himself.

The job posting that beat an 80% turnover industry standard

The clearest proof of what “humanized voice, automated at scale” actually buys you didn’t come from his marketing business. It came from his home care agency.

Bryan recently interviewed Kelly Moreno, chief solution officer at Workforce Solutions Rural Capital of Texas, about aligning job requirements with real skills.

He took her advice and applied it to something that matters directly to his bottom line: how his home care agency writes job listings for caregivers.

“Telling the right story in our job listings has made our recruiting for our caregivers so much easier,” he said, “because they’re coming in with the mission. Our retention far outweighs the industry standard of 80% turnover.”

The mechanism is exactly the same one from his content system: he wrote the story once, in his own voice, and used AI to generate consistent variations in that same brand voice going forward, “because sometimes you get busy, you forget, and you don’t want to retract your own.”

The story has to start human. The scale comes from AI. In an industry defined by churn, that combination is the difference between constantly re-hiring and actually retaining people.

The Chamber calendar, or: buying back the thing AI can’t replace

Bryan is, by his own description, “almost a fixture” at the Round Rock Chamber of Commerce - at nearly every one of the more than 100 events it runs each year. That presence isn’t decorative. It’s the actual mechanism behind everything else he does.

But a weekly podcast recording collides with a Chamber event every other month, and he kept missing them.

So he built an AI agent to scrape the Chamber’s calendar month to month, cross-check it against his own schedule, and flag conflicts before they happen. As simple and unglamorous a use of AI as exists, and one of the most valuable things he’s automated.

“I want to be present in person,” he said. The AI’s entire job is protecting the thing AI can’t do for him.

Bryan traces the whole philosophy back to a line from his first mentor, long before the internet existed: “I’m temporarily motivated to be permanently lazy.”

That is, he said, “the blessing of AI.” Not removing effort from your life, but removing the repetitive effort so what’s left is the relationship-building no system can fake. “The reason I can get to do so many things is because I keep buying back my time.”

What this means for you

Bryan’s one-line summary of all of it: “The more you are you, the better the AI is actually gonna be.”

That’s not a slogan. It’s an operating instruction.

Before you automate anything, write the thing in your own voice first: the job listing, the blog post, the brand story.

Then use AI to scale that voice across every channel and every repetitive task standing between you and the next in-person conversation.

The automation isn’t the differentiator. It’s the delivery mechanism for the differentiator, which was you the whole time.

Bryan Eisenberg opens YouXAI on September 12 in Waco, and he’ll go deeper on the exact systems behind all of this.

Early bird tickets are $59 through July 31 at youxai.live.

— Fernando Labastida YouXAI Speaker Preview Series

Grab your early bird tix now: $59

Hi there!

I’m writing to you today from Round Rock, Texas, the up-and-coming suburban city just to the north of Austin…home to Dell, The Round Rock Express baseball team, and James Talarico!

In this edition:

• The YouXAI Summit, September 12th, 2026

• Why the Viral Genius Framework could be the next business model for the post-AI era

• Why you might already be positioned to be found on AI

I’m putting my money where my mouth is

_{Me with Hope Koch, closing keynote for YouXAI, at the set of Rogue Media Network}

A few weeks ago I repositioned this newsletter from Strike Marketing to B2B Events. My thesis: in-person and virtual events are the post-AI marketing cheat code.

And because I’m so immersed in my daily tasks (sometimes it feels like I’m a trout swimming upstream against a current of tasks), I hadn’t realized: I’m already doing the B2B events thing!

I’m actually organizing the You X AI = Unstoppable summit in Waco, TX, on Sept. 12th!

I’m literally already putting my money where my mouth was!

Come to Waco Sept. 12th

Look, I get it. Waco has had a bad rap in the past. But I’m telling you, it’s a different city.

Chip and Joanna Gaines, the TV personalities from the reality show “Fixer Upper,” have built Magnolia Market, a flagship retail experience featuring home and garden shops, a baking company, coffee shop, and a lawn with food trucks.

You also have Baylor University. The Dr. Pepper Museum. Startup Waco. 25N coworking, and so much more.

It’s a rising city.

And we’re hosting the You X AI = Unstoppable summit there at the beautiful Performing Arts Community Center.

The premise: the future doesn’t belong to the people who use AI the best. It belongs to the people who use AI to amplify what makes them unmistakably human.

Some of the notable speakers:

• Bryan Eisenberg, New York Times bestselling author of 11 books, including “Call to Action” and “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark

• Hope Koch, Godfrey Sullivan Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics, Hankamer School of Business · Baylor University

• Russ Henneberry, co-author of Digital Marketing for Dummies. He’s the Founder of theCLICK, an AI marketing training and community platform for the modern marketer.

• Andrew Lane, founder of Design Hacker and Brand Builder Pros, helping entrepreneurs leverage AI to build standout brands, marketing assets, and visual identities that convert.

• Tommy Landry, founder and principal of Return On Now, an Austin, Texas-based digital marketing and AI visibility consultancy.

• Two international students from Baylor who have created and launched an AI app called AdmitAI that helps foreign students navigate the American university application process

To get to know them, check out our YouTube channel where we’ve posted interviews with our speakers (more videos coming soon).

And much much more…

Come to Waco! I’d love to see you there!

Click here to register - early bird pricing of $59 ends July 31st.

Get your $59 early bird ticket

Why the Viral Genius Framework could be the next business model for the post-AI era

I recorded my first video in a series on the Viral Genius Framework (the framework that undergirds the YouXAI Summit).

Outside Lamppost Coffee in Round Rock, eleven months ago, my friend Bryan Eisenberg went quiet in the middle of our conversation.

I’d been explaining how I work with founders: the interviews, the pattern-hunting, their beliefs, and how I was turning those into books and events.

He stared off into the trees long enough that it got awkward. Then he looked at me and blurted out: “Viral Genius.”

I said, “Viral Genius?”

He saw the perplexed look in my eyes, and went on to explain: “What you do for founders…by extracting their hidden zone of genius…that’sthe Viral Genius Framework!”

I thought it was a really clever name. I tested it out at networking events, and with friends.

Everybody was intrigued. One company owner said, “That’s a really cool name.”

Then I ignored it for almost a year.

And the other day I got together with Bryan again, and I was explaining to him the concept of the YouXAI Summit.

He looked at me with that look in his eyes that said, “Are you serious?”

He said, “That’s the viral genius. You’ve been ignoring it for a year, but it’s all you’ve been doing.”

You see, I was uncomfortable with the word “viral” because I wasn’t making anybody go viral with the LinkedIn algorithm. I was just sharing their ideas.

Bryan clarified: “Think about it. You’re helping extract their unique ideas and getting their ideas to spread. It’s like TED: ideas that spread.”

Ahhhhh, now it all makes sense. And yes, I’ve been circling around this idea for years!

What I’ve been running away from has been staring me in the face the whole time, and I never noticed it.

So I decided to go all in on my own zone of genius.

This week I published the first episode of a seven-part video series built around those two words. It’s embedded above, and I want to give you the short version of why it exists.

The AI shift that spurred the framework

You’ve felt the shift even if you haven’t named it.

You read a post and it’s pretty good. Then you read another, and another.

Different authors, different industries, all polished, all articulate, all forgotten ten seconds later.

AI has made average incredibly easy to create, and when average becomes free, being average stops being valuable.

We’ve hit one of those rare moments when technology changes the basis of competition itself.

• The Industrial Revolution commoditized manufacturing.

• The internet commoditized distribution.

• AI has commoditized average.

So what becomes scarce? The things no model can generate on your behalf: judgment, taste, originality, trust, humanity.

The hundred-year-old story that’s still relevant today

There’s a hundred-year-old story that explains what to do about it.

Claude Hopkins, the copywriter behind Scientific Advertising, was hired to fix sales for Schlitz Beer.

The brewmasters walked him through their process:

Bottles sterilized with live steam.

Water drawn from deep artesian wells.

Obsessive filtration at every stage.

Hopkins asked why they didn’t tell people any of this. The brewmaster shrugged: “Every brewery does this!”

“Maybe they do,” Hopkins said. “But your customers don’t know that.”

Schlitz became one of the biggest beer brands in America without changing the beer. They changed what people noticed.

And I’m convinced every founder has a Schlitz moment of their own. Something clients constantly thank you for that you’ve stopped seeing, because you’ve lived with it too long.

The Viral Genius Framework is a five-step answer to that blindness, and the episode walks through every step.

You find what you’re blind to: the stories you keep telling, the questions people always ask you, the process that feels ordinary to you and remarkable to everyone else.

You give it a name, because your genius isn’t useful until people can remember it. You turn it into intellectual property - books, frameworks, summits, keynotes - assets that compound instead of content that evaporates.

You create trust experiences, because AI can generate infinite information but it can’t create the shared human gatherings where trust actually gets built.

And then, only then, you bring in AI to amplify it all. The order is the argument. Amplified average is still average, just louder.

One line from the episode matters more than the rest. Five years from now, nobody will ask whether you know how to use AI; they’ll assume you do, the way nobody asks today whether you know how to use email.

The question they’ll ask is why should I choose you. Your answer won’t be your product or your prompts. It will be the person you’ve spent your entire life becoming.

It took Bryan five seconds to see my viral genius. It took me eleven months to believe him. My hope is this series helps you find yours a whole lot faster.

Next week, Episode 2: how I actually start excavating a founder’s genius, and why the answers are almost never where people expect.

What’s the thing your clients keep thanking you for that you’ve stopped noticing? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.

Note: I created an app to get the process started. Answer 12 questions about you and your business here, and you’ll get a complete strategy:

• Positioning

• Messaging

• Your new category

• A plan for your book, event, content cascade.

Check out the app here:

Discover Your Zone of Genius

One Brilliant Idea: Tell the Same Story Everywhere — or AI Tells Your Old One

Tell the same story everywhere, or AI will tell your old one for you.

That’s the warning from Tommy, founder of ReturnOnNow and a YouXAI Summit speaker.

ChatGPT and Claude describe your business by assembling signals from your homepage, about page, LinkedIn, directories, and reviews.

If your messaging has evolved but half your properties still say the old thing, the models get confused.

They’ll place you in the wrong market, against the wrong competitors.

Tommy’s fix costs nothing: audit every channel you control and make sure each one describes you the same way.

Catch Tommy’s full talk at YouXAI, September 12 in Waco.

That’s it for today’s newsletter, and I’ll see you next week!

Cleveland, Ohio, September 9th, 2013. 8 AM.

It was the morning of the first date of Content Marketing World - the third CMWorld after its debut in 2011.

I was at the opening keynote of Content Marketing World. Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, gave an amazing, inspiring speech.

All the breakouts, the keynotes, the vendor booths, the after party at The Blues Brothers nightclub, and the trip to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, created an experience like no other I had participated in.

I felt like I was part of an exciting new movement. A marketing revolution where artists, writers, and intellectuals could finally participate in marketing in a meaningful way.

I went again the next year. And the next.

I made new friends. I got to know the man, the myth, the legend - Joe himself - and we became friends.

And the most important thing: I felt like I had found my tribe. My community. My people.

What started as a blog - the Content Marketing Institute blog - turned into an annual conference, an advisory, a physical magazine, a series of podcasts, and the intellectual nerve center for the discipline and practice of content marketing.

But the foundation was the annual conference - Content Marketing World - where friends, partnerships, companies, and a tribe of loyal adherents were forged.

In 2016, Joe sold the Content Marketing Institute to UBM - a global events business based out of the UK.

From that one exit, Joe and his wife Pam became wealthy. Joe leveraged his newfound wealth to:

• Write a novel

• Travel to Italy to meet his extended family

• Boost his “Orange Effect” nonprofit organization

• And start another company - The TIlt - to help creators start content-based businesses

But the important thing to note: the main asset UBM was buying was Content Marketing World

UBM CEO Tim Cobbold said: “Our Events First strategy focuses on improving the quality of UBM’s portfolio. And Content Marketing World, as the leading event in this high-growth sector, enhances our portfolio...”

And it gave Pulizzi $17.6 million.

Tonight at 6 PM, at Besos Cocina & Cantina, I’m speaking about this at my debut meetup for my new meetup group, “B2B Events”.

I’ll explore:

• Why Content Marketing World became so valuable that UBM acquired Content Marketing Institute - and what that teaches us about building business communities.

• The shift from the Attention Economy to the Trust Economy: why events may become more important, not less, in an AI-saturated world.

• How conferences, meetups, summits, and communities create “collective effervescence” - the emotional energy that no AI-generated content can replicate.

• Why the future marketing funnel may look less like a funnel and more like a gathering place.

• How founders, consultants, agencies, and B2B companies can use events to build authority, relationships, and revenue without needing thousands of followers.

If you’re interested in the future of B2B marketing, community building, events, AI, and thought leadership, join me for a lively discussion and networking with fellow professionals.

Sign up here, and I’ll see you tonight!

Register Now

https://www.meetup.com/b2b-events/events/315173678/

P.S. Remember: your drink (margarita, mojito, Cuba Libre, whatever) is on me!

Why do some companies have rabid fans, super-consumers, a tribe… people who feel identified with a cause, a community, with the company as its titular head, while others just have clients?

I believe that discovering what sets the first group apart from the second is the key to thriving in the age of AI slop.

Why?

From the evidence I’ve seen so far, AI slop has degraded trust - the most important psychological element in marketing today.

Events as The Post-AI Cheat Code

I hypothesize that companies that organize annual category keystone events (think Dreamforce, Inbound, Craft + Commerce) have inadvertently discovered that post-AI cheat code.

And I believe this pairing - a category (or movement), coupled with a category keystone event - builds movements that attract a rabid fanbase who have identity-level connections to those movements and the companies that lead them.

My “Malcolm Gladwell-lite” Research Project

For the next three months, I’ll be embarking on a research project about this.

I’m not pursuing an academically stringent study.

My wife has completed a Ph.D., and she’s pursuing a second. She’s an expert at academic research, and believe me, it’s back-breaking work!

I’m pursuing what I call a “Malcolm Gladwell lite” project.

Gladwell was a journalist who knew how to interview people, find obscure scientific studies, and get the human stories that made his books unputdownable reading.

I’m no Malcolm Gladwell, but I think I can interview people, extract interesting stories, find academic research, and put it all into a research report that might be interesting reading….all by September.

The Category-Level Keystone Conference

What is a category-level keystone conference?

Many software companies have annual user conferences, but this is different.

If you go to DreamForce, Inbound, Craft + Commerce by Kit, the Responsive Non-Profit Summit by Virtuous CRM, or even Flip MyFunnel by Terminus back in the day, you’d have noticed something different.

These are category-level events. They’re not conferences designed to promote the company (although they do a great job of generating leads and cementing company loyalty).

I went to a FlipMyFunnel conference in Boston in 2017. The conference was all about ABM - hence the name FlipMyFunnel, which references the visual of an upside-down sales funnel that perfectly encapsulates the concept behind account-based marketing.

I hardly heard mention of the name Terminus (the company organizing the event). It was all educational.

I was also amazed that apparent Terminus competitors had booths there.

Sangram Vajre and the Terminus team intentionally made the conference about the category rather than the company, gathering marketers, sales leaders, analysts, and practitioners around a common mission.

The atmosphere was energetic, collaborative, and surprisingly human-centered. The talks centered on customer obsession, sales-marketing alignment, authentic relationships, and challenging the status quo.

A Few More Examples of Category-Level Keystone Events

Virtuous: Responsive Nonprofit Summit

Former Virtuous VP of Marketing, Bryan Funk, was a speaker at a summit I organized (the Strike Marketing Summit).

The Responsive Nonprofit Summit, a virtual event, was key to driving growth for Virtuous, from $1 million ARR, to a $100 million series C funding round.

In his talk, Bryan made very clear: the Responsive Nonprofit Summit wasn’t created to promote software. It was created to advance an idea.

Virtuous believed nonprofits had spent years optimizing transactions when they should have been building relationships, and they coined the term Responsive Fundraising to describe a more personal, donor-centered approach.

The summit became the gathering place for that movement.

Thousands of nonprofit leaders, fundraisers, and marketers showed up to learn, share ideas, and explore what responsive fundraising looked like in practice.

Over time, the event evolved into something much larger than a lead-generation program. It became a category-building engine that helped establish Responsive Fundraising as a recognized philosophy within the nonprofit sector and positioned Virtuous as one of the companies leading that conversation.

Wynter: Spryng

Spryng feels like the natural evolution of the B2B marketing conference.

The attendees are largely experienced operators who have already heard the standard presentations, read the books, and listened to the podcasts.

What draws them to Austin is the opportunity to spend time with other people wrestling with the same challenges.

Peep Laja, CEO and Founder of Wynter, designed Spryng around conversations, roundtables, shared meals, and carefully curated peer interactions.

The result is a gathering where relationships become the main attraction.

The event has developed a reputation for attracting thoughtful practitioners who care deeply about positioning, messaging, customer research, and evidence-based marketing.

A few hours at Spryng often feels more like joining a professional community than attending a conference.

Kit: Craft + Commerce

When Nathan Barry, Kit founder and CEO, launched Craft + Commerce, he wasn’t gathering email marketing software users. He was gathering creators. Authors, YouTubers, newsletter writers, course creators, podcasters, and online entrepreneurs came together around a shared belief that expertise can be transformed into a business.

The event developed a distinctive atmosphere that blended practical business advice with creativity, storytelling, and personal growth.

Attendees often describe feeling energized by being surrounded by people building similar businesses and facing similar challenges.

Over time, Craft + Commerce became one of the defining gatherings of the creator economy, helping reinforce the identity of what it means to build an audience-first business.

Wistia: WistiaFest

WistiaFest ran from roughly 2014–2019 and became a beloved annual gathering in Boston focused on video marketing, storytelling, creativity, and brand building

They earned a devoted following because it reflected the personality of the company itself: creative, human, and deeply focused on storytelling.

The event attracted marketers, video producers, content creators, and brand builders who believed business communication could be both effective and memorable.

The presentations were often excellent, but the experience extended far beyond the stage.

The conference felt like a celebration of creativity in business, with attendees connecting around a shared appreciation for authentic communication and high-quality content.

Many people left WistiaFest with new ideas, new friendships, and a renewed excitement for their craft.

Around 2020, Wistia replaced the in-person event with CouchCon, a virtual conference. Wistia itself explicitly states that CouchCon “took the place of our annual in-person conference, WistiaFest.”

Since then, Wistia seems to have shifted its focus toward webinars, virtual events, Wistia Live, and ongoing educational programming rather than reviving WistiaFest as a major annual conference

Gainsight: Pulse

Pulse helped transform Customer Success from an emerging concept into a recognized profession.

Thousands of customer success leaders, practitioners, and executives gathered annually to share strategies, stories, and lessons learned from the front lines of customer retention and growth.

The event became a meeting place for people who viewed customer outcomes as a core business function rather than a support activity.

For many attendees, Pulse served as both professional development and professional validation.

They weren’t simply attending a conference; they were joining a community of people who spoke the same language and cared about the same mission.

Next Steps in the Post-AI Trust Architecture Research Project

I hope I’ve given you a pretty good idea of the exciting findings that await you and me when I complete this research.

Do you know of any companies that have category-level keystone events? Or who have built their company on the back of events (whether large or small, annual or monthly)?

Send any leads my way for founders, CEOs, and leaders I can interview for this research project. I’ll be forever in your debt!

I was in Uruapan, Mexico, enjoying a Day of the Dead parade organized by a local middle school, when I got the email:

“Are you available for a Zoom call in an hour?”

My colleague, the graphic designer who I’d been working with for our content marketing campaigns, had been laid off earlier that day via a Zoom call, so I knew what was coming.

I made my way to the nearest Starbucks, got my dark roast coffee of the day, and sat down at a table as far away from anybody as I could.

When I logged on to the call, there was my manager, together with the HR lady.

My heart sank.

I can’t remember the words he told me, but it was some version of a rote speech that went something like, “While we value your services, we’re cutting costs. and your position has been eliminated.”

I think you know the drill.

After getting over the disappointment (hey, I’ve worked in tech my whole life. Layoffs are nothing new), I decided to enjoy the rest of my stay in Mexico with my wife.

I was part of the first wave of AI-generated layoffs.

That moment initiated my journey as an AI-forward marketing consultant. And the irony wasn’t lost on me that the content my former company started creating was AI-generated.

The AI Trust Apocalypse

Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute (and The Tilt), has been sounding the alarm about AI permanently changing content as we know it.

After attending MAICON, the premiere AI marketing conference organized by the Marketing AI Institute, Joe saw something he could not unsee: a future completely dominated by AI content.

His working philosophy for the current moment: make your mark in content, build your community, your media company, your newsletter, before it’s too late.

He says, “We have two to three years max to do it before it’s too late.”

Just yesterday, he published an article in which he stated:

“...human-created content is about to become the minority...[w]e can already see it happening. AI-generated articles are everywhere. Synthetic influencers are building audiences. AI-generated music is finding its way into the culture. Bots are building OnlyFans pages and making millions. None of this is some far-off prediction anymore. It is here.”

His solution? “...in a world where synthetic content is everywhere, another person trusting you becomes the moat.”

I think Joe hit on something here, but I think it’s more than that.

Let me explain…

The Four Marketing Eras

Before I get into what I believe the solution is, let’s recap the last 75 years of marketing.

I believe there have been four eras.

1. The Era of Reach (1950s - 1990s).

This was the television era (and also the radio era….maybe that era started in the 1920s?).

Could you reach your consumers via television, radio, newspapers, magazines? Could you pay enough money to reach the maximum number of consumers to be successful?

2. The Era of Attention (1990s - 2024)

This was the era we all know and love. The internet removed all the gatekeepers. We no longer had to pay the TV networks, newspapers, billboards, and magazines to reach our audience.

We could reach our audience directly: through blogs, social media, YouTube, search engines.

3. The Era of Trust (2026 +)

This is the era we’re in right now. We don’t trust the content that’s out there anymore. Even bots “...are building OnlyFans pages and making millions,” as Joe said in his article.

Our timelines are filled with AI Slop. Google’s search has been replaced by Google Answers.

4. The Era of Belonging

But what I really feel is that we’re in the era of belonging. It’s more than trust. It’s identity, it’s belonging.

Think about Harley-Davidson. Think about the Salesforce ecosystem, and the thousands of businesses that exist today because of Salesforce. Think about Kit, and all the creators who see Kit as more than just an email marketing tool, but the caretaker of a creator community.

The New Marketing Funnel

The current moment requires a new funnel, a fundamentally different funnel.

The old, familiar funnel, sometimes referred to as the “buyer’s journey,” was something like this:

• Awareness

• Interest

• Decision

• Purchase

And it was extended by Ryan Deiss and Russ Henneberry at DigitalMarketer.com with:

• Convert

• Excite

• Ascend

• Advocate

• Promote

This was a beautiful model, because it described how a company could go from unknown to profitable in a systematic way.

But it was all predicated on content - human-generated content.

If I, as a marketer, took the time to write an article from my vast well of knowledge that taught how to do something, I could generate trust with my audience.

Content was the trust mechanism.

No more.

Now AI can do it all, and consumers know that (we’re not dumb).

Even AI practitioners can’t stand AI content.

I was at an AI meetup a couple of weeks ago. After the presentation, I was talking to an AEO/GEO practitioner (ok, just picture the context: AI meetup. AI practitioner. It’s AI all the way).

The AEO/GEO expert told me, “I’m sick of all the AI Slop in my timeline.”

The irony, the irony (said in Col. Kurtz’s voice).

So if content is no longer the way to generate trust, we need a new funnel.

And I’m working on that model (it’s still a work in progress, so have patience with me).

It’s called “the identity journey.”

The Identity Journey

The identity journey goes something like this:

• Transaction: I buy the product.

• Preference: I like the brand.

• Belief: I adopt the worldview (this is where category design comes in).

• Identity: I see myself as part of the category.

• Belonging: I find my people.

• Advocacy: I spread the idea.

Let’s get into a little detail:

Transaction: I buy the product

I’ll use a B2C example here, even though this is a B2B-focused newsletter.

I’m a chocoholic. I love buying chocolate bars.

If I go into a store, and I see chocolate bars at the checkout counter, I’ll grab one and put it on the conveyor belt.

No big deal. If it’s Hershey’s, or some other brand, I don’t care. It’s chocolate!

Preference: I prefer the brand

Lately, I’ve been making a beeline for the candy aisle. I’ll grab a Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut bar. I’ve loved Cadbury’s since my teenage years living in England. Especially the Fruit & Nut bar.

So many of us have brand preferences: Abercrombie & Fitch. Yeti.

In productivity apps, I like Kit, WordPress, and Trello.

Belief: I adopt the worldview

Now this is where we get into the post-AI trust architecture portion of this new buyer’s journey.

After the 2016 release of the ground-breaking category design book, Play Bigger, creating categories has become an increasingly bigger deal.

But even pre-dating the book, companies like HubSpot and Salesforce led the way.

Salesforce changed our whole concept of what it meant to be a software company, from on-premise software, which was the norm up until 2000, to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which is the norm now

At some point, between 2000 and 2005, there was enough of a groundswell of software companies and consumers who believed that software should be a service, not a product you download and install on your computer, that SaaS became the default, not on-premise.

Same in the 2007-2009 frame, when HubSpot introduced inbound marketing. Enough companies believed that attracting clients was far better than interrupting them.

That belief changed our whole belief about marketing.

Disruptive innovations are more successful when they change our belief systems, instead of just convincing people they have better features and benefits.

Identity: I see myself as part of the category

Are you a Longhorn or an Aggie? A Microsoft app user or a Google app user?

Many times, we identify with the company and its worldview. This is not just brand preference. This is brand identity.

If you can fuse your market’s identity with a group identity, with you and your worldview at the head, you’ve successfully created a new identity where people see themselves as part of you.

Belonging: I’ve found my people

In my working theory, this is the holy grail for companies in the post-AI world. This is where trust is cemented.

I have a friend who is a Salesforce systems integrator. He is part of the whole Salesforce ecosystem. He goes to Dreamforce every year. His preferred AI is Einstein. He belongs to the Salesforce community. His identity is that of a Salesforce person.

I mentioned Kit earlier. Through their webinars, Nathan Barry’s YouTube channel and podcast, and especially through Craft + Commerce (Kit’s annual conference), they’ve developed a whole community of creators who feel at home in the Kit world.

If you can make people feel at home in your world, identify with your worldview (your category), and become a part of your community, you win!

But there’s a subtle distinction here. Belonging doesn’t happen in isolation.

You don’t belong to a product. You belong to a group of people.

A category can create a shared belief. A brand can create a shared identity. But community is where those beliefs and identities become social.

That’s why the strongest brands in the world don’t just sell products. They create ecosystems, movements, and communities where people can find others who see the world the same way they do.

And that’s where events enter the picture.

Advocacy: I spread the idea

Once your identity is fused with the community you’re part of, then you want to tell everybody about it.

Now, which company doesn’t want that?

The Role of Events and Collective Effervescence

But there’s one important element missing in the “identity funnel”: events.

Let’s view the identity journey once again, but with events interlaced between the stages:

• Transaction: I buy the product.

• Preference: I like the brand.

  • Events: virtual summit

• Belief: I adopt the worldview (this is where category design come sin).

  • Events: Conference

• Identity: I see myself as part of the category.

  • Events: Workshop; Retreat; Mastermind

• Belonging: I find my people.

  • Community

• Advocacy: I spread the idea.

You have virtual events, conferences, workshops, masterminds, retreats, all designed to join people together on a shared journey.

But most organizers just focus on delivering a great event, leaving out a crucial detail: the role of collective effervescence in creating that belief, the identity, the belonging, the advocacy.

Collective effervescence is a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim. It describes the intense energy, exaltation, and sense of unity that people feel when they gather together in a group for a shared purpose, such as a religious ritual, protest, concert, or sporting event.

And it gets biological too.

When collective effervescence occurs, a fascinating biological process happens. Attention synchronizes. Dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins increase. Emotional contagion spreads through the crowd. Individual identity temporarily gives way to group identity.

For a brief period, people stop thinking, “I am Fernando,” “I am Sven,” or “I am Xochitl.”

They begin thinking, “We are founders.” “We are marketers.” “We are creators.” “We are Salesforce professionals.”

The brain shifts from an individual identity to a collective identity.

That’s why powerful events feel fundamentally different from consuming content online.

Content can transfer information, but events can create belonging.

Conclusion

In the post-AI world, with synthetic content proliferating on your “for you page,” the websites you visit, the YouTube videos you watch, it’s impossible to know who or what to trust.

And the solution is as ancient as time. From the cognitive revolution of 70,000 years ago, home sapiens have been using myth - powered by rituals, gatherings, and ceremonies - to join societies together under a shared belief, identity, and community.

These ancient methods, baked into our DNA, are the key to what you can do today to generate that trust in the era of infinite, AI-generated content.

And I’m on a quest to research the topic. I don’t want to confirm my new “identity journey” viewpoint. That’s just my hypothesis.

I want to see where the data leads me and create a framework based on that.

And I’ll be sharing my journey here.

Come join me!

That was a real line, the hook from an iconic ad campaign launched by R.J. Reynolds in 1946, which ran until 1952.

Amazing that was an actual advertisement.

The advertising agency that designed the campaign knew they needed to generate trust with the public, and who better to convey that trust than your friendly neighborhood doctor (with glasses, rosy cheeks, and a cigarette).

But as we all know, that was false advertising. Criminally false advertising.

It broke that sacred trust they had forged with the audience, and contributed to a rise in lung cancer, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis (let alone the decline in trust in the marketing profession during the advertising age).

We’re at that point again, but not because the marketing industry is deliberately deceiving the public despite dozens of well-researched, peer-reviewed studies about the dangers of cigarettes, as was the case in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

We’re at that point because of AI.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m very AI forward. I use Claude Cowork to run my business: I’ve built websites with it, it keeps me on track with my weekly tasks, I organize myself with AI, I write proposals with it, etc.

I feel like I’ve dialed in how to use AI to help my marketing consulting business in an appropriate, ethical way.

And I’ve learned how to put the appropriate guardrails on.

I believe AI should be there to amplify our own unique humanity, intelligence, insights - our DNA - not replace it.

But AI has run amok in our content feeds.

I was at an AI meetup the other day, and one of the attendees told me (this guy is a really talented GEO/AEO expert) that he’s just sick of all the AI slop filling up his LinkedIn timeline.

I had to agree…which was ironic, since we are both AI-forward marketers at an AI event.

But AI has eroded trust.

A recent TechRadar article (appropriately titled: “It’s not just you — LinkedIn is being flooded by awful AI-generated posts, and tech workers are particularly bad at it”), published a summary of a Publicate study from January of this year that said that out of 1,000 LinkedIn posts, 73% of finance posts were AI-generated, followed by 57% of technology posts, and 54% of legal posts.

It’s gotten so bad that LinkedIn decided to take action.

LinkedIn’s VP of Global Editorial, Laura Lorenzetti, said in a May 20th post,

“While AI can be a helpful tool for refining language, we’re seeing a rise in what many call “AI slop…” …To address this, we’re taking meaningful steps to crack down on automation tools, dial back on generic content, and strengthen authenticity.”

The AI era has given way to the ‘era of trust’

If LinkedIn is taking this type of action, you know thousands of users have complained about the AI slop in their timeline.

I’ve seen it myself. People who should supposedly know better have been using AI to write their posts without any kind of review or editing.

(And I’ve also seen brilliant marketers, founders, and CEOs use AI to make their posts authentic, a pleasure to read, and compelling).

A 2025 Edelman-LInkedin study said that only 32% of users actually trust AI-generated content.

There’s that word trust again.

You see, trust is the most important factor in marketing. And trust has become far more important today than before the AI-era (it was always important, it’s just more glaringly important now).

We’re at that “doctor recommending cigarettes” inflection point.

The rise of events as the new trust vehicle

How can you generate trust in today’s post-AI world?

I postulate that events are going to be the new trust vehicle in B2B marketing for 2026 onward.

Events took a nosedive during COVID, but since 2023 they’ve seen a resurgence.

Forester reported that 59% of B2B organizations planned more hosted events over the next 12 months, while Splash found that 88% of marketers see events as key revenue drivers.

There is more research than I have room for here, but the evidence seems to be pointing to events as an ever-more important tool in a B2B marketer’s arsenal.

As I was doing the research for this article, I asked myself this question: why are events so good at generating trust?

I didn’t want to resort to the pablum repeated everywhere:

“Authenticity,” “Engagement,” “Community.”

That’s just surface-level stuff we marketers repeat ad nauseam when we want to claim our marketing is real and human.

I wanted to go deeper. And I found something interesting: biology.

Yes, events trigger a biological reaction that helps marketers key into a phenomenon our ancestors have tapped into for thousands of years.

The biology of events

When I was a freshman in college, I went on a two-month volunteer trip to the Dominican Republic with a group called Amigos de las Americas.

The goal was to live in an impoverished rural area, implement a community sanitation program (aka: building latrines), and hopefully stop the fecal-oral transmission cycle of gastrointestinal diseases.

This was especially important because dehydration due to diarrhea is the number one cause of infant death in the developing world.

I was 19 years old. My partner, Laura, and I experienced culture shock as soon as we were dropped off in the village of El Salado, our home for the next two months.

But we adjusted, and the people from the village became our lifelong friends.

On my return to Texas, I experienced reverse culture shock. I couldn’t relate to the materialism, the minutiae that Americans called “problems,” and the lack of awareness of what’s going on in other parts of the world.

A year passed, and I joined Amigos again. When I went to Houston for leadership training (I had been promoted to route leader), I met up with so many colleagues I had worked with in the D.R.

It was like the time hadn’t passed.

We hugged, remembered funny stories (they didn’t seem funny at the time…like when I got sick and had the runs all day, waking up delirious at noon with a medicine man chanting ancient cures for me).

The feeling of getting back together with my fellow volunteers from Amigos de las Americas was unlike anything I felt before.

We had gone through experiences together that nobody else in our hometowns had ever experienced. We had forged a special bond during that summer of 1985.

Ok great, but what does this have to do with B2B marketing events?

Everything.

What I experienced with all those kids during the summers of 1985, ‘86, and ‘87 was something called collective effervescence.

Collective effervescence is a phenomenon coined by Émile Durkheim in 1912 to describe the intense shared emotional activation that emerges during collective rituals. The feeling of unity and aliveness that happens when people experience something together.

A 2022 meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Psychology confirmed that collective gatherings consistently produce heightened emotional states, blurred boundaries between self and other, and stronger social bonds.

The phenomenon is more than psychological; it’s biological.

A study measured heart-rate dynamics during a Spanish fire-walking ritual and found that participants, even spectators who were related to participants, showed synchronized heart-rate patterns.

And there are actual chemicals involved.

Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, is released during shared emotional experiences, producing synchronized biological responses between people.

Research from Ruth Feldman’s lab and others shows that oxytocin synchrony is the neurochemical signature of genuine bonding. It’s not just “feeling close.” Your nervous systems are actually coordinating.

Events and collective effervescence

An in-person event is a low-intensity collective effervescence event. But it still produces measurable bonding and oxytocin synchrony

A virtual summit is a shared journey. Participants go through something together over multiple days, which deepens that bond.

An in-person event activates the full biological stack: physiological synchrony, oxytocin release, and the beginnings of identity fusion

This is why no amount of AI-generated content can replicate what an event does.

Content is consumed alone. Events are experienced together, forming a biological connection between participants.

It’s where trust is generated.

You see, we’re biologically wired to join groups, go through rituals, chant together, learn together, go through painful things together.

While I don’t see B2B events bringing fire-walking or soccer chants to a venue near you any time soon, think about what you go through during an industry conference:

• You sit in the crowd at a dynamic keynote given by a professional speaker who has a unique ability to excite the crowd.

• You then go to a workshop at a breakout event, and work on problem exercises with the people sitting at your table.

• At night, you might go to House of Blues and dance together (or participate in a silent disco like I did at CEX last year).

All of a sudden, you’ve bonded with everybody there! You shared your business goals with your tablemates. Had drinks with event goers at the hotel next door. Clapped together at Joe Pulizzi’s keynote address.

Now you’re liking each other’s posts on LinkedIn, getting on podcasts together, and buying each other’s products!

Events are the ultimate trust mechanism in this post-AI world.

Events as post-AI trust infrastructure

Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, exhorts incubated startups to “Do things that don’t scale.”

That’s shorthand for “doing difficult things.”

Events are scalable, especially if you organize a virtual event, but they’re difficult to organize. They require forging relationships with speakers, sponsors, all the people you need to organize a successful event.

You need to get people to register, pay money, then show up.

Then you need to book a venue, organize catering, and coordinate the booth space.

Contrast that to AI-produced content (or even AI-repurposed content).

AI makes things easy. It’s leveled the playing field. And that’s a beautiful thing.

But we all know it didn’t take a lot of effort.

It used to be difficult to write and publish content on a consistent basis. Not anymore.

But organizing an event is the last thing left that’s difficult. Your prospects see it, they know it implicitly.

And when you organize it the right way, you can engineer that collective effervescence that can bond your community to you forever.

That’s trust built into biology.

That’s the new post-AI trust infrastructure.

And I’ll be publishing a weekly newsletter essay about this.

Will you join me on this journey?

I don’t want to use the term “movement” lightly. Because when you start a movement, that’s something real.

Lives are often on the line. Freedom is at stake. Enough people are frustrated and angry that they need to make a change NOW.

And I’m not referring to the current political environment (all that is true right now…but this is a business post, so I won’t get into politics).

But we’re at the cusp of something, and I feel like we’re riding the wave of a new movement.

And this movement is getting a specific venue, date, and content agenda on Sept. 12th in Waco.

What is this movement?

I don’t want to trivialize the word “movement.” But I don’t want to trivialize what’s going on at the intersection of AI and the creator space either.

For almost thirty years now, the movers and shakers in business were the coders, the app builders, the ones who built the hardware and software that run the digital economy.

And these technical folks had a special place in the new order of things.

If you were a coder, you were guaranteed a six-figure salary right out of college. You were treated to ping pong tables, catered lunches, and hammocks in cushy Silicon Valley offices.

The founders of high-profile tech startups came from Stanford, Harvard, Yale. Maybe Berkeley and USC.

They got into Y Combinator cohorts. They got funding from Sand Hill Road investors: Andreessen-Horowitz, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins.

The quiet revolution outside the core

But while all this was going on, a quiet revolution was happening in cities like Waco, Asheville, Santa Fe, Lincoln, Marfa, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and dozens of other cities outside the traditional startup hubs.

Creators were starting podcast networks. Entrepreneurs were starting accelerators. And marketers were creating communities.

Then AI came along.

In the last six months alone, AI has completely leveled the playing field.

There are now no more barriers to creating technologies, companies, workflows, and organizations.

And the center of gravity is moving out to….everywhere.

Because this quiet revolution produced creators who amassed followings, communities, and real businesses.

Then AI gave them the same power that Silicon Valley, Route 128, and Silicon Alley startups have had.

They defied the narrative that “AI will steal your job,” or that “AI will replace your voice.”

They have their own strong voices, and they’re using AI to turn those voices into physical things. Into real businesses. Into thriving ecosystems.

Take Waco, for example.

Waco is not only known for Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Magnolia Market.

There’s another presence making its mark in the creator space. My friends Mike Hamilton and Casey Jones have turned the Rogue Media Network into a podcasting powerhouse, giving homes to dozens of podcasts, with high production values and wide-reaching influence.

I’m partnering with Mike, and Casey, and Melvin, and others, to launch the YouXAI summit - a one-day conference that is officially putting its stamp on this new movement.

The You X AI movement.

Why Waco?

Because Waco has a thriving startup and creator ecosystem. And frankly, it feels like the Austin of the early ‘80s, but with AI and digital distribution.

From Startup Waco, to Launch Waco, to the McLennan Small Business Development Center, to the Baylor University Innovation Garage, to Rogue Media Networks, and yes, even to Magnolia Market, Waco is an example of this quiet revolution in the making.

And you can see the same dynamic happening in St. Louis, Cedar Rapids, Bangor, Jacksonville, and Sacramento.

On September 12th, at the beautiful Performing Arts Community Center in Waco, we’re hosting a one-day conference with creators, AI practitioners, marketers, and thought leaders.

They’ll be teaching about how to unlock your zone of genius. Your voice. Your creativity.

And how to use AI to enhance your uniqueness, not turn it into AI slop.

Who this is for

If you’re a small business owner, a marketer, a creator, an entrepreneur, a manufacturer, an educator, or somebody who supports these roles, this is for you.

And this is going to be different. Yes, there’ll be traditional conference talks.

But we’re also having practical hands-on workshops.

AI vendors will be on hand to show you the latest tech.

There’ll be food, drinks, and local entertainment.

Will you join us September 12th, in Waco, Texas?

I was brainstorming with myself the other day…I must have looked crazy to anybody who sees me, because when I brainstorm, I turn on my phone voice recorder, and I talk into it like I’m on an animated phone call where passions are strong.

Except I’m talking to myself…and my recorder.

I was talking to myself about marketing, the existential issues around AI, and whether AI is helping marketing or making marketers redundant, and stuff like that.

It suddenly dawned on me: we’re not doing normal marketing.

In fact, the old go-to-market (GTM) playbook is pretty much obsolete.

You know what I mean, the traditional cold outbound email, cold DMs, content marketing, LinkedIn ads, Meta ads, trade shows, influencer marketing, PR, mindless boring webinars and events, etc.

None of that stuff matters because the reality of the situation is that everybody’s seen this movie before, a hundred times.

Everybody has seen every product, service, course, mastermind, offer, come-on, video, LinkedIn post, newsletter article...

It’s the broken record of digital marketing.

Which has now been given super-duper alien growth hormones in he form of agentic AI and LLMs and all that.

AI has created the solution and the problem.

Author and content marketer Robert Rose has a saying: “The invention of the ship also invented the shipwreck.”

The advent of AI has knocked down the final barrier to content creation and marketing, and business creation.

There is no excuse for anybody not to start a business and market their business using AI.

But this is also the problem.

Because if anybody can do it, then anybody can do it, which has created the sea of sameness that we’re all drowning in.

The solution is the problem.

And I’ve been seeing it with my own eyes at local chamber of commerce meetings, on LinkedIn, and with friends who have started AI-focused businesses.

These earnest entrepreneurs are just falling in love with what they can do with Claude Cowork and with Open Claw and with the whole Gemini suite of products.

Not to mention all the vibe coding tools like Lovable, Cursor Base44, and more.

I know a young woman who has vibecoded three really good apps already.

She loves vibecoding apps.

And that’s beautiful, and it’s also a problem, because with everybody creating fantastic apps and workflows with AI, and loving what they’re creating, they also create their own blind spots.

I’ll bring up another old saying:

“It’s better to fall in love with the problem and your client than to fall in love with your product.” Unfortunately, everybody’s falling in love with their product.

And everybody’s doing the same ol’ same ol’ marketing for their products they’ve fallen in love with.

Category Led Growth

And so many of these earnest, enthusiastic, and frankly beautiful entrepreneurs are taking a product-led growth approach because they sincerely believe in their heart of hearts that their product is so good that it will just attract people. They have the philosophy of “if you build it, they will come.”

But in reality, they’re just contributing to the sea of sameness.

Now I don’t want to discourage anybody here, but hear me out because there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Going back to my crazy-looking brainstorming session where I was pacing around the my living room, arms were flailing around in enthusiasm, talking into my recorder. I had this hypothesis that I’m actually carrying out with two of my clients.

It’s called category-led growth.

I ran this idea by my buddy Chris Stanley, and he had a great way of putting it. I’ll share with you what Chris told me. (Thanks, buddy, for the mind picture).

In the traditional marketing approach, you have all these disparate marketing moves:

• cold outbound

• LinkedIn

• Meta advertising

• search engine marketing

• PR

• inbound marketing

• content marketing

Think about these as different arrows in your quiver, and you are just shooting arrows randomly at your target.

But in category-led growth, you have a single spear, and that spear is large, accurate, and deadly.

What does the spear represent? It represents your own category. You have to build this spear piece by piece because it’s so big; you can’t just carve it out of a single piece of wood.

Each piece of the spear is:

• the cold outbound

• the LinkedIn

• the Meta advertising

• the search engine marketing

• the PR

• the inbound marketing

• the content marketing

• the lightning strikes

You see, with category-led growth or category-led marketing (you’re not promoting your company or your products; you’re promoting your new category).

And the good news is, this roadmap has already been drawn.

When Joe Pulizzi was building the Content Marketing Institute, he was blogging and speaking, and writing books about content marketing. He wasn’t talking about the Content Marketing Institute’s services or any of the services or products that he offered. He was just talking about content marketing.

When HubSpot started, they were talking about Inbound Marketing. They barely talked about the HubSpot platform (which, frankly, was kind of a dog at the beginning).

Joe and HubSpot were building their categories.

Because their category WAS their product marketing.

Their category was the target for their cold outbound, their LinkedIn content, their search engine marketing, PR, content marketing, and lightning strikes.

All these had one purpose: building their categories. And by the way, their categories pulled their products and companies into prominence by the sheer weight of gravity they created of their categories.

Because, as I said above, the category is the product marketing.

When you market your category, you set the rules for the products within the category. Any competitors that come later have to follow the same rules.

Each marketing move builds the powerful, deadly spear you’re building.

I’m talking about this next Tuesday, April 21, 12 PM CST.

Register now: https://tinyurl.com/summit-roi

See you there!

I’m loving the stage of my business right now.

I’ve created a framework. I’ve chosen a target market. And now I’m reaching out to my network to test the messaging and refine my positioning.

And I wouldn’t be sad if I sold a few marketing engagements as well.

But what’s really fun is answering objections.

Yes, you heard me right. I’m not some masochist who enjoys the pain of hearing prospects object to my offering, and then trying to devise ways to argue against them.

I’m actually really enjoying finding ways to get people to think differently about what I offer…because frankly, what I’m offering is different than the normal, lead-gen, branding, GTM strategy.

This is the argument:

You do ads / cold outbound / social media marketing / trade shows, SEO, whatever.

And they work fine…until they don’t.

Two cases in particular:

One friend I was talking to, he said he’s really found a formula that works using Meta ads. And he doesn’t want to fix what isn’t broken.

My same friend spent an insane amount of money to join a mastermind of a major, well-known guru (you’d know who they are if I told you).

This guru told him to double-down on ads. And it’s working!

But here’s the thing: it’s working to generate leads, at a certain cost per lead.

However, what if he became the guy that people would pay insane amounts to to be in the same room as him?

What if he became the go-to person in a new category he dominates?

• His cost-per-lead would go way down, because people would see him as the category leader.

• He’d start to get more organic leads because people would know him and look for him to solve the specific problem he had positioned himself to solve with his new category

• He could charge more because his ICP would come to him to solve a problem only he can solve

• He could become that guru who charges lots and lots of money to hold masterminds, instead of him having to attend those masterminds

Another friend has frankly had a tough time. All of 2025, his tried-and-true cold outbound stopped working. I mean zero leads.

He loves the category design concept I presented to him, but was skeptical that a 3-day summit would work for his company.

“CEOs would not spend 3-days in a virtual summit,” was what he told me.

But the point is not attendance, it’s capture. He doesn’t need a CEO to sit through three days. He needs him to register.

The CEO needs to see the topic and think, “this is relevant to me.”

He needs to raise his hand…even for a second.

Because that’s the signal.

That’s the difference between guessing who might be interested… and knowing who is.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

My friend is thinking about a summit like an event. “Will CEOs attend?”

Fair question.

But it’s the wrong frame.

CEOs already attend multi-day events. They just call them conferences.

They fly across the country, stay in hotels, sit through sessions, network, drink bad coffee… and pay thousands of dollars to do it.

So it’s not that they won’t engage.

It’s that they won’t engage with something that feels like just another vendor trying to sell them something.

And that’s the real shift.

This isn’t about getting 100 CEOs to sit through every session.

It’s about getting the right CEOs to show up at all.

It’s about becoming the person who convenes the conversation… instead of competing inside it.

Because right now, in most industries, you’re one of many. One of 3,000. One of 10,000. Another option in a sea of sameness.

But when you organize the room…you’re no longer one of many. You’re the one people associate with the problem.

And the speakers? They become your category megaphones, as Bryan Funk said in his summit session in December.

Each one brings their own audience. Their own credibility. Their own trust. You’re not building an audience from scratch. You’re orchestrating access to other people’s audiences.

So no… we don’t need full attendance. We need attention. Intent.

We need the right people to say, “this is worth checking out.”

Because from there, everything changes.

Now you’re not chasing leads. You’re attracting them.

And that’s a very different game.

If your current lead gen math looks fine but your growth is still capped, sign up for our free training next Tuesday, April 21, 12 PM U.S. Central Time.

This training is worth an hour.

Register for free.

Register Now

Category design is still a mystery for most business owners.

Play Bigger, the first book ever to talk about category design as a deliberate strategy, instead of just an accidental and happy consequence of doing things right, was first published in 2016.

Since then the Category Pirates - a band of thinkers, writers, and pirates that has alternated between Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, Al Ramadan, Kevin Maney, David Peterson, Mike Damphousse, Nicolas Cole - have written hundreds of books about the topic.

But the general public - or rather the general business public - still are unaware of its power and how to do it.

But for some reason I started seeing it early on.

I saw it when HubSpot created the Inbound Marketing category.

I saw it when I was in college, when Starbucks created the upscale, espresso-based coffeehouse category.

And I saw it when Geocities created the precursor to today’s social media category.

But the question I had: how can a solopreneur create their own category?

I’m not talking about a tech analyst-recognized global category with its own magic quadrant.

I’m talking about a category you can dominate, with people speaking the vocabulary you invent to describe a methodology you created that becomes a new way of doing things.

A category that you give away without registering a trademark for it - yet you, by the fact that you were the first to talk about it, become the top dog in the category.

Joe Pulizzi did it. He was just one person who started blogging about content marketing in 2007, and created a global category with its own conference, rules, and positions in corporate America.

Peter Drucker did it in the 1950s when he created the official management category. Drucker was just a researcher.

David Allen did it with the Getting Things Done category.

And today at noon CST, I’m going to show you how to do it.

• If you’re a startup - whether bootstrapped or VC-funded

• If you’re a solopreneur

• If you’re an agency owner

• If you own a local shop or two

You can design your own category.

Before you join me today, fill out this form as I may pick on you to design your category for you: https://form.jotform.com/260899039112057

And sign up for the webinar at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Tf-CL3z-Qm2oG7Iya7L6Hg#/registration

See you in less than two hours!

Right out of college, he became a heroin addict, and he was briefly institutionalized.

He had 35 professions by the time he was 35.

He became an ordained minister for the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness.

He then consulted for Lockheed Martin’s human resources department, working one-on-one with executives to help them get organized and become more productive.

David Allen, a drifter for the first decade and a half of his adult life, was then encouraged to write a book about his productivity methodologies.

So he wrote Getting Things Done, which became a corporate productivity manifesto.

And now his vocabulary is standard fare for modern productivity enthusiasts:

Terms like “inbox,” “next actions,” “two-minute rule,” “weekly review,” “someday/maybe,” “mind like water,” and “open loops” entered the lexicon of knowledge workers worldwide.

Getting Things Done has been published in over thirty countries and translated into more than twenty-eight languages.

David Allen, an individual with a messy, meandering career, created a new category - the “GTD” category - despite his apparently aimless trajectory.

More than 300 third-party apps have been developed to help people implement the GTD methodology - none built by Allen himself.

Companies like OmniFocus, Things 3, Todoist, Nirvana, TickTick, and Everdo, all explicitly market themselves as GTD tools or GTD-compatible systems.

The point is that Allen, as a solo consultant with a book, created such a strong category that software companies started building products around his framework.

If an ex-heroin addict and job hopper can design a new category (albeit unconsciously), why can’t you do it consciously?

Let me tell how you can start to do this: record yourself describing everything you do all day.

Yeah, it sounds unnatural, but trust me.

I was on a live AMA with Tim Stoddart and Darrell Vesterfelt - two preeminent digital marketers.

Darrell said there’s magic in recording yourself talking to yourself, describing what you do, and giving that to your AI.

And what you thought was just random ramblings, your AI will pick out the patterns and break down your hidden methodology.

And your hidden, unconscious methodology, once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

And once you see it, you can design a category out of it.

And if it’s truly valuable, you can write a book about it.

And if you write a book about it (and you promote it correctly), you’ll have a passionate fan base who’ll adopt your methodology and start using your vocabulary.

On Friday, April 10th, I’ll show you how you can do that.

And I’ll even demonstrate this live.

And if you want me to work on your company to help you design your own category, fill out this questionnaire, and I’ll apply my my Claude Cowork skill to create the beginnings of what could be a unique category.

Register here, and I’ll see you live April 10th, 12 PM CST!

When I wrote my first book to establish a category I had designed - the startup book category - I felt major imposter syndrome.

You see, the Category Pirates - Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, Al Ramadan, Kevin Maney, Mike Damphousse - are these major ivory tower gurus in the category design space.

And I was just some guy.

And then…get this…then I had the audacity, the utter audacity, to ask Christopher Lochhead to write the foreword for my book.

He said yes! Plus he gave me advice on my book title and subtitle.

I’m telling you this because imposter syndrome is real, and I’ve lived it.

I’ve been working as a community manager at a private community for aspiring digital entrepreneurs.

This is a very interactive space, with lots of commenting, sharing, asking questions about the courses, bouncing ideas off each other.

The one thread I’ve seen tying all these people together is confidence. Or lack thereof.

They suffer from major imposter syndrome.

You’re probably going through some of this yourself.

Confidence is a major issue for those of us venturing into new territory - like starting a business, trying out a new technology, or experimenting with a new business strategy.

In fact, I believe the reason many business owners refuse to change the way they do business is not because of inertia, but because of imposter syndrome. They don’t believe they can learn new methodologies or technologies until it’s too late.

When I first started blogging full-time in 2009, I never thought I could achieve the heights of Joe Pulizzi and Brian Clark. I thought they had some kind of special anointing.

But I kept at it. Not because I believed I could be successful at blogging, but because I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.

And then it started working. I got my first client through a blog post that went viral. I got more than 1500 subscribers to my newsletter (that I didn’t actually send any newsletters to).

And I launched my first marketing agency.

Again, I experienced major imposter syndrome when I told a client, out of desperation, because what I had been doing for him up till then wasn’t generating leads, that we needed to organize a three-day summit.

I immediately regretted telling him I would do it for him. I mean, who was I to think that I could organize a successful, multi-day, multi-speaker summit?

I wasn’t Darrell Vesterfelt, who organized a summit that attracted 101,000 registrants. (Yes, you read that right: a six-figure registration number!).

I wasn’t one of those “summit bros” who were constantly organizing online events, mini-conferences, and huge webinars with thousands of participants.

Who the hell was I to claim I could organize a summit?

But I did it anyway. And we got 904 registrations!

Now you’ve got to understand: I would have been ecstatic if I got 300 people registered. But 904? The number seemed impossible.

But we made it happen.

And how about designing your own business category?

In a 2019 article, David Sacks said that no objective is more important to company founders than early category leadership, because over 75% of the market cap in a business category goes to the category leader.

Most of us reading that would say, “Sure, that’s well and good for David Sacks to say he’s talking to venture-funded startups.”

But that’s the pernicious lie we tell ourselves. We make up some excuse that justifies our imposter syndrome, our lack of belief in ourselves, our lack of self-confidence.

But what’s to stop you from designing your own category - and actually make it an established category, with its own vocabulary that people start using in everyday conversations?

I mean, how cool would that be?

Let me give you the moment when I suddenly realized that my lame excuses for my lack of self-confidence came into sharp relief:

When I was organizing that summit for my client, it started as just a crazy idea.

A few weeks later, we had a website. We had a full roster of speakers who had all said “Yes!” We had their pretty faces plastered across the summit website.

I had interviewed all the speakers, and I had all this content from their video interviews that I was turning into a cascade of content.

People started registering for the event.

I suddenly realized I was like God. (Not really, but you know what I mean).

I could speak things into existence.

I pitched the summit idea to my client, and he said yes, and we created something from nothing. From a seed in my brain to a fully organized, well-attended summit.

What I’m trying to say to you is, you can design your own category.

Because you don’t have to be some anointed guru. You just have to speak it into existence.

My next webinar is April 10th, and I’ll be talking about how you can design your own category. In fact, I’m going to do a live demonstration where I’ll design your category for you, with the help of a Claude skill I created.

Fill out this survey right here - as much detail as you can - and I’ll see you on the 10th at noon CST..

Will you join me on the 10th?

Register Here

I was at a costume party on Saturday night. I dressed up as sort of a cross between Burt Reynolds in Boogie nights; Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider; and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

I sang “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones during the Karaoke section, and then my son-in-law belted out “Hotel California.” Blew me away.

I met a young woman dressed as a Roaring ‘20s flapper girl.

Underneath her wig and Greta Garbo ‘20s fabulousness was a tech startup founder who imparted wisdom that shifted the whole world for me.

The first thing she told me was how she moved to Australia for seven years and launched a startup with money from the same investors who invested in Canva.

Then I started telling her about the Strike Marketing Institute, because she asked: “What do you do?”

I was star-struck. I mean, she was a startup founder with a famous investor. And she had a nice exit!

She couldn’t possibly be interested in what I had to tell her, right?

She was, and she was especially intrigued by the quarterly strike marketing cadence, the virtual summit machine in which a company would actually organize a full-blown summit every quarter.

She said, “You need to read David Sachs’ The Cadence.”

I thought it was a book and searched for it everywhere on Amazon, and then she clarified, “No, it’s just an article on Substack.”

That night, after the party, at about 2:00 a.m., I read the article from beginning to end, and it suddenly dawned on me.

The lightning strike concept is exactly the way every founder needs to organize their business, regardless of whether they’re going to design a new category or not (but I believe that every business needs to design their own category, more on that in another article).

The whole concept of The Cadence is very simple: Instead of just running your business on a daily routine - the daily grind, as I like to think about it - organize it around quarterly launches.

Every three months you build up to one big quarterly launch. The summit becomes the launch event.

Release a new product or new features, and then launch it as Steve Jobs did at his famous launch events.

Your whole company works towards that launch:

• Your email marketing

• Your social media marketing

• Your sales outreach

• Etc.

But what you don’t sell a product like a software-as-a-service or an agentic AI solution? What if you’re just a services company, like maybe you’re a fractional CMO or a CFO?

It doesn’t matter. Come up with some kind of new productized service or a new featureto your service.

Do this very quarter.

You avoid the daily grind, the content hamster wheel, the boredom of doing the same thing day in and day out.

You avoid posting on LinkedIn content every day to see what’s moving the needle.

Instead, always have something new you and your audience can look forward to, four times a year.

And in case you’re wondering if all you’re doing is talking about products and features, no..

You’re using the quarterly release as an excuse to invite guest speakers to provide tons of value to your audience.

You’re also generating pipeline…lots of pipeline!

Like what I did in December.

I’m just a one-person show, and I was able to get 416 people registered for my Strike Marketing Summit.

I plan to make this my go-to marketing and business operations approach.

And I seriously recommend you look into it. (Here’s that link to that article again).

So if you ever meet a flapper girl or karaoke singer, if you’l get some life-changing advice.

Are you signed up for the webinar tomorrow?

Tuesday, March 31st, 12 p.m. Central Time. I’m talking about why cold email is dead and how a more human-centric event-based approach is replacing it.

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/cold-dead

See you then!

I’ll be honest: the marketing playbook I’m using is one I stole from Peep Laja.

If you don’t know Peep, you should. He’s the CEO and founder of Wynter. He is also the founder of CXL and Speero. A prolific entrepreneur, he initially focused on conversion rate optimization (CXL, Speero) and then audience research.

Peep’s story is incredible. He started blogging in 2011 about CRO.

He once said on a podcast, “[I]blogged like my life depended on it.”

His blog got 300,000 monthly visits, which built his email list to over 100,000 subscribers through his daily 150-250 newsletter signups. And he attracted 100 quality agency leads per month.

Peep’s a machine.

Then, in 2021, to launch and grow is new company, Wynter, he started a virtual monthly mini-conference cadence called Wynter Games.

He recruited 15-20 guest speakers each event. They became huge lead generators for his new business.

Then he launched a twice-yearly in-person event called Spryng. It was an “un-conference.” You arrive, attend keynotes from practitioners, not thought leaders. And you get matched up with 6-8 potential clients or partners hand-picked for you.

His philosophy was:

• Personal brand over company brand.

• Events as positioning, not just lead capture

• Email is the sales platform

Peep was frankly the inspiration to a series of mini-conferences I organized in 2021-2022 to grow my Spanish-language blog, Content Marketing Latam.

And he also inspired my journey into virtual events.

What exactly did I steal?

Everything.

I launched my frist virtual summit in December of last year.

I’m starting to write a daily Substack article like my life depended on it.

I’m organizing a weekly webinar series.

I’m planning to launch a monthly “mini-summit” series.

And…an in-person conference!

I’ll hopefully be holding it in September in Waco. Why Waco? Because it’s a cool, up-and-coming city (halfway between Dallas and Austin).

I want to prove that a one-person enterprise can keep up this machine-like cadence to grow my category and my personal brand, generate leads, and serve as an example to solopreneurs, small businesses, and growing enterprises that have reached a revenue plateau and to grow their pipeline, their brand, AND their category!

Learning in public

A mantra I learned somewhere is: “Learn in public.” And that’s what I’ll be doing on my journey.

You see, I know events are powerful - and an organized multi-layered approach that includes daily emails, small, medium-sized, and large events is like super-fuel. I’m also going deep with Claude Cowork skills and plugins to automate the whole thing.

I’ve also been inspired by Russ Henneberry’s “March Madness” plugin contest which he’s organizing for members of his community at theCLICK. My idea is to productize my own “zone of genius.”

My plan is to:

• Carry out and refine my event machine process

• Document it step-by-step

• Encapsulate this into a skill and create a plugin out of it.

So am I a thief?

I’m stealing from Peep Laja’s playbook, because as Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy.. Great artists steal.”

That sounds a bit conceited, but I truly aspire to be a great artist!

And I’m stealing from Darrell Vesterfelt, from Bryan Funk, from Rachel Starr, and from Sheriff Subair.

But to make it my own, I’m adding what I think is the most important differentiator in the AI age: designing your own category while using agentic AI.

Stay tuned. Share your experience. Let me know what you think.

Join me next Tuesday, March 31st, at 12 PM U.S. Central Time for my first weekly webinar.

See you there!

Join the fun!

A few weeks ago I was making the case for category design to a sharp, successful founder I’ve been talking with about repositioning his company.

He stopped me mid-pitch with what I’ve started calling “The Ford Argument.”

“Fernando,” he said, “Henry Ford didn’t invent the car. He improved it with the assembly line. Why can’t I just be a better version of what already exists?”

It’s a reasonable objection.

It’s also based on a misreading of what Ford actually did.

The Ford Story Everyone Gets Wrong

Before Ford, cars were luxury items. Hand-built. Expensive. Associated with a tiny wealthy elite who had the money and the mechanical know-how to keep them running.

Ford didn’t walk into that category and try to beat Rolls-Royce on craftsmanship. He didn’t try to make a better luxury car.

He asked a completely different question: what if a car wasn’t a luxury item at all?

That question created a new category — affordable personal transportation for everyday American families — and Ford owned it completely. He didn’t improve the existing category. He made it irrelevant for 90% of the market by designing a new game with different rules. Rules that happened to favor him.

The assembly line was the innovation.

The category was the strategy.

The Test I Use to Know If You’ve Actually Done It

Here’s how I tell the difference between real category design and really good rebranding:

If your company disappeared tomorrow, would the category still exist?

Tiff’s Treats started delivering warm cookies to people’s doors in Austin in 1999. (The idea: what if cookies worked like pizza delivery?) Today, Crumbl, Insomnia Cookies, and hundreds of local copycats operate in that same space - with or without Tiff’s. The category escaped the founder. That’s how you know it’s real.

Alli Webb started doing blowouts in her clients’ homes for $40 in 2008. Not cuts. Not color. Just blowouts. She had seen an existing service and asked: what if that was all you did? She created the blowout bar category, sold the company for $255 million, and blowout bars now exist in every major city with no connection to her whatsoever.

Joe Pulizzi - who was a salesperson at a B2B publishing company called Penton Media when he coined the term - named “content marketing” in 2007. He’s since stepped back from the Content Marketing Institute he built. The industry, with its own conferences, its own job titles, and nine-figure budgets inside Fortune 500 companies, marches on without him.

Tiff’s started in a dorm room. Alli started in her clients’ kitchens. Pulizzi started with a blog.

None of them invented a technology. None of them needed VC money to start.

What This Has to Do With Yesterday’s Email

(Quick note in case you missed it: yesterday I wrote about your zone of genius. In the article I told the story about a class I taught via Zoom to 14 small business owners in Mérida, Yucatán, and how we surfaced the hidden categories inside their businesses live on the call.)

The corporate education company in that class didn’t just offer better training programs. They were actually designing a category called “Corporate Education Retention” - the only company built by psychologists specifically to solve the dropout problem, not just fill seats.

The plant nursery wasn’t just selling exotic plants. She was designing a “Plant Adoption Center” - the place where you don’t just buy a plant, you adopt one, and the store educates you post-sale to make sure it survives.

Neither of those founders thought of themselves as innovators. Both of them thought they were just doing their job a little better than the person down the street.

They weren’t improvers. They were category designers who hadn’t named what they were doing yet.

The Real Answer to the Ford Argument

The improver vs. innovator debate is a false binary. The best category designers in history were both - they used existing tools in a completely new way:

• The assembly line existed before Ford.

• Touchscreens existed before the iPhone.

• The internet existed before Amazon.

• Food delivery existed before Tiff’s Treats (Domino’s….helloooo?).

Category design isn’t about inventing something from scratch. It’s about seeing the space in people’s minds that doesn’t exist yet - and being the first one to name it.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with today: what space are you naming?

Because if you’re still trying to be the best version of something that already exists, you’re playing someone else’s game with someone else’s rules.

And in a world where AI can produce a thousand “improved” versions of anything by next Tuesday, “better” is not going to be enough.

I’m running a live webinar next Tuesday, March 31st at 12 PM CST. The first session is about why cold outbound is dying — and what’s replacing it.

The whole series, though? It’s really about this: how to stop competing in categories you can’t win, and start designing the one you can own.

Register here for the March 31st webinar

I had a recent experience with a good friend that ended badly.

He was asking me how I achieved X. He kept peppering me with questions, and it started to irritate me.

I had a mini-explosive reaction after the nth question. I told him, “Look, you just do it! It’s not rocket science….”

At that moment, I lost a friend.

He said, “Fernando, don’t worry….you’re not going to hear from me again.”

And he meant that literally.

I regretted exploding at him, and I wish I could take it all back (I’ll reach out to him soon, as long as I can get over my own fear of rejection).

In this sad story, there’s an important truth I want you to understand: you have a zone of genius that other people recognize, but you don’t.

And if you can figure out a way to unlock that genius and pour it into a proprietary framework in a systematic way, your business can take off!

Your Hidden Genius

What I learned from this experience, and from the hard knocks of building my business after getting laid off in 2023, is a method that founders and business leaders can use to differentiate themselves in the market.

The word genius is a curious word. We assign it almost mystical qualities. We lionize the “geniuses” of today and recent history: Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Mr. Spock…I think you know what I’m talking about.

But we don’t recognize our own genius. I know I didn’t.

Because we go about our day - doing our work, solving problems, talking to clients or colleagues - and it’s just normal for us.

We got to where we are today by learning, iterating, making mistakes, implementing what we’ve learned.

And when somebody asks us, “How did you do that?” We think that question is funny. We just say, “I don’t know, I just did it.”

And regrettably, sometimes the question annoys us. “How could they not know how to do this? Doesn’t everybody know this?”

Let me share an example from recent experience: out of desperation, I stumbled on a method to promote a client’s 3-day summit. He had zero budget for advertising and PR, and we only had four weeks left to fill the “seats.”

We had recruited some high-profile speakers, including a Mexican senator, and I didn’t want them speaking to crickets.

So in a flash of inspiration, I decided the only way to promote the summit was to interview the speakers and turn their interviews into an AI-powered content cascade.

Each interview turned into a long-form YouTube video; five or six YouTube shorts, reels, and LinkedIn videos; a couple of newsletter articles, and four to five LinkedIn posts.

I posted all the content to my client’s social media channels and newsletter.

The buzz we created attracted people with large audiences who offered to promote the summit for free to their subscribers/members/audience.

And by the time the first day of the summit rolled around, we had a huge turnout!

I thought everybody did this, but people started asking me, “How did you do it?”

In one of those “lightning bolts in the shower” moments, it finally clicked.

The interviews I was doing revealed methodologies, frameworks, models, processes I had never seen before.

These people were geniuses in their own right! But they hadn’t codified their methodologies, frameworks, models, and processes.

And when I ran the movie of my professional life in my head, I realized I had those too!

The AI Unlock

Working with ChatGPT, Claude.ai, and now Claude Cowork, I figured out a way to extract that genius.

I created a category design Custom GPT that turned interview transcripts into categories. This was a genius-extraction GPT.

I then refined it to create a Claude Project, and I eventually used it to create a Claude Cowork skill out of it.

I took five months of interview transcripts with Kenny, a client of mine. I invoked my category design skill, and voilá: Kenny now has a unique framework he’s using to design his own market category!

I did the same thing with a class of students studying entrepreneurship at a university in Mexico. The students are all small business owners.

I had them fill out a JotForm survey with questions like, “Why do clients hire you? What differentiates you from others?” Etc.

During the class, I opened Claude Cowork and pulled up the answers from the JotForm survey.

We read their answers together. And then I picked two businesses to build categories for, right there on the Zoom call.

One was a company that develops study plans for corporations to help employees complete their continuing education programs. Good business.

When I asked the founder what frustrates her clients, she said most companies pay for these programs, but the process is disorganized, and nobody tracks who actually finishes.

The company was founded by psychologists. Their real skill isn’t curriculum - it’s retention. Keeping adults from dropping out.

My Claude skill created a whole framework for their business. Claude created a name for their framework: “Retención Educativa Corporativa” or “Corporate Education Retention.”

Then I did a live demo for the owner of a plant nursery that sells specialized substrates for exotic plants.

Her survey questions revealed that people’s plants die within weeks because nobody teaches them what soil and nutrients to use.

To solve this, the nursery delivers post-sale education and consulting. Their belief? They trust their customers to learn to care for these exotic plants, unlike competitors who just sell and move on.

Claude called it: “Centro de Adopción de Plantas” or “Plant Adoption Center.” You don’t buy a plant here. You adopt one, and they make sure it survives.

The reactions were immediate. The students got it.

After the class ended, I sat down with Claude and did the same exercise for all 13 businesses:

• A carnicería (butcher) became “La Despensa de Proteína Familiar” - or “The Family Protein Pantry”

• A makeup artist became “Estudio de Belleza Real” or “The Natural Beauty Studio.”

• A piñata maker became “El Centro de Tu Fiesta” or “Your Fiesta Center.”

Thirteen businesses. Thirteen categories. Thirteen zones of genius.

This is the unlock I’m seeing with AI: take your human, stream-of-consciousness conversations and musings, ask AI to reveal the patterns, unique approaches, and sudden insights, and then it into a differentiator that can create a whole new category for your business.

I’m starting a webinar series where I explain this framework. The first one is about how cold-outbound is dying, and what’s replacing it. Register for it here. It’s next Tuesday, March 31st, at 12 PM CST.

The second and third ones focus on the Viral Genius Framework and the Category Creation Formula, respectively.

I hope to see you there next Tuesday!

Register Now

Did you ever watch the Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits?

That was the episode that stood out to me the most (as well as “Nosedive,” the one about a society where everybody can give each other a review).

In Fifteen Million Merits, everyone lives in a screen-covered room, pedaling exercise bikes all day just to earn the currency they need to exist.

When the main character finally snaps - smuggling a shard of glass into a live talent show, holding it to his throat, screaming that the whole system is designed to consume them - the judges don’t punish him. They tell him it was the most real thing they’ve ever seen.

Then they offer him his own weekly show to do it again.

He takes the deal. His rebellion gets a time slot. The rage becomes a product.

That episode aired in 2011. It described 2026 and onward with uncomfortable precision.

I’m not talking about how human rage will become the ultimate currency (although by looking at any TikTok or Instagram feed, you’d get the impression that’s all there’s left).

What I’m talking about is “humans being humans” as the product:

• What we think

• What we feel

• Our experiences

• Our upbringing

• Our unique personality traits

That’s the ultimate currency.

Though the Black Mirror episode conveyed this in an extreme way, I think that’s what’s left for us. It doesn’t have to be ugly; it can be beautiful and useful and yes, even entertaining!

Sure, AI can now practically do everything: your email marketing, your copy, your outbound prospecting, even your videos (using tools like HeyGen that can turn you into an AI clone to make chillingly accurate videos of you (remember ‘the uncanny valley’ anyone?).

It can even run your business for you while you’re drinking a Mai-Tai on the beach using an OpenClaw-powered agentic workforce!

But because it can do everything, humans are rebelling. “AI Slop” has become a commonly used term for a reason.

Now we crave authenticity. In person events. People sharing ideas with one another. Group learning.

Yes, AI can make your life easier, but does it connect with the audience? Can we fool our audience into thinking our content is authentic?

I hypothesize that it can’t.

Which is why I’m doubling down on a marketing approach that relies on you - and your executives, your clients, your partners, your promoters - talking.

What’s more authentic than having a conversation? When you and your companions talk, you’re thinking out loud. You’re sharing thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness that digs deep into your inner being.

All your experiences, what you’ve read, your personality, the moments that shaped you, all that comes out in conversations that last more than 10-minutes.

I love that, and I think there are a lot of people out there like me who love that too.

So, what has this got to do with marketing?

I’m going to contradict myself here and say that AI can amplify your authenticity.

But wait, didn’t I just say that the magic wand of AI - which makes a marketer’s life easier - comes across as inauthentic?

Yes I did, but with a caveat.

I predict that the marketing of today, and over the next few years, will depend on us having genuine conversations, but that AI - with the shocking speed of its algorithmic advances - can honestly replicate the authentic conversations we’re having.

I was calling it “Organic AI Marketing” last year, and today I still think it’s a thing….even more so because AI can now reason, can emulate our turns of phrase, and inject the way we talk in the right places of an otherwise boring piece of AI copy.

The marketing of today is learning from people, talking with people, meeting with people.

Trust comes from recommendations, who has authority and expertise and experience.

Not how much copy you can create because of AI, but how much trust you command because people know you, and you know them.

What does this have to do with marketing?

I’m starting a weekly webinar series on what I’m calling the “Authority Infrastructure.”

It’s what the Strike Marketing Institute has bet on big time: authentic human communication. Events as a way for your community to gather and create content. Real human connections. Extracting real insight from you, the founder, and your zone of genius

The first webinar, “Why Cold Outbound Is a Dead End for Founders Like You,” is next Tuesday, March 31st at 12 PM CST.

Register here to join me.

I’m going to talk about why cold outbound - email, DMs, cold-calling, which can now be orchestrated entirely by AI - is like pushing a heavier and heavier boulder up a hill.

It’s less effective because you’re fighting the impossible-to-win battle of trust.

Anybody can spin up an outbound campaign.

But what’s replacing it?

I’ll get into that in the webinar….

Register here to join me.

See you there!

Pablo Gonzalez is the Chief Evangelist at Vendoroo, an AI maintenance solution for the property management industry, and founder of BetheStage, a marketing agency built around content co-creation. In this Strike Marketing Summit session, Pablo walked through how he designed a category, built an alliance of AI companies, secured a free 2,400 sq ft room at the industry’s biggest conference, and generated $2.5M in closed-won revenue in 36 hours on a $48K budget. Connect with Pablo on LinkedIn.

Most founders show up to conferences with a booth, a banner, and a bowl of candy. They make eye contact with strangers, hand out business cards, and fly home with a spreadsheet of “leads” that will never convert. They spend $20,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 and the best they can say afterward is “we had some good conversations.” The pipeline impact is unmeasurable because there isn’t one.

Pablo Gonzalez showed up to the Broker/Owner conference in property management and spent $48,000 — roughly what a mid-tier booth package costs at most B2B trade shows. He walked away with $2.5 million in closed-won revenue in thirty-six hours. Not pipeline. Not “qualified leads.” Closed-won revenue. The difference between Pablo’s approach and the booth-and-candy approach isn’t budget. It’s architecture. Every dollar he spent was in service of a specific transformation he wanted attendees to experience, and every element — from a roaming AI robot to a pair of Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses — was engineered to drive that transformation forward.

What Pablo shared at the Strike Marketing Summit wasn’t a highlight reel. It was a complete operating manual for what he calls a “lightning strike” — a concentrated, time-bound takeover of an existing event that compresses months of relationship-building and pipeline development into days. And the principles behind it apply to any founder trying to break through a revenue plateau, whether you’re spending $48,000 or $4,800.

Who is Pablo Gonzalez?

Pablo’s obsession with community-driven business development started ten years ago at his brother’s funeral, when 1,200 people showed up and gave him a visceral understanding of what real community means for the people inside it. He spent the next decade proving that community creation — not advertising, not cold outreach, not content marketing as typically practiced — is the highest-leverage business development mechanism available. He built a $40 million sales channel for a real estate development company. He created the largest community event in the property management industry. He turned a podcast into a business development engine that got him written about in The Ultimate Sales Machine and connected him with the architects of category design — Kevin Maney, Mike Damphousse, and Christopher Lochhead — as peers and collaborators, not fans.

When the AI maintenance startup Oo saw what Pablo was building in property management, they brought him in as Chief Evangelist with equity in the company. His job: design a category and win it. What he did next is the story he told at the Summit, and it reframed how I think about what’s actually possible when you combine category design with content co-creation and a willingness to engineer experiences instead of just buying impressions.

The POV That Made Everything Else Possible

Before Pablo built anything — before the pavilion, before the partnerships, before the revenue — he built a point of view. And this is where most founders get the sequence wrong. They start with the product. They start with the features. They start with the demo. Pablo started with a story about the world.

The point of view he crafted for Oo centered on something every property manager already knew but hadn’t articulated as a category-level problem: maintenance is the number one driver of negative Google reviews in property management. Not leasing. Not communication. Not fees. Maintenance. When a toilet breaks at 2 AM and the response takes three days, the tenant writes a one-star review. When that review shows up on Google, it doesn’t just hurt the property manager’s reputation — it affects their ability to attract new owners, retain existing ones, and compete against the VC-backed property management companies that can afford dedicated maintenance coordination teams. Pablo called this the fundamental unfairness of the system: property managers were being punished on Google for a problem they didn’t have the staffing to solve, and the conventional response — hire more people, add more process — couldn’t scale because the economics of property management don’t support it.

That narrative did something critical. It shifted the conversation from “here’s our AI product” to “here’s why the world is unfair to you, and here’s what a different future looks like.” As Pablo put it during the session: “When you have a good POV, it provides the perfect frame for a conversation for your content stream. You’re talking about the problem, not about your solution. And when you’re talking about the problem and you have a great solution for it, there’s always going to be an opportunity to tie it back to yourself — in a non-salesy way.”

That point of view became the organizing principle for everything that followed. The podcast interviews validated the pain. The AI Alliance summit socialized the narrative. The conference takeover crystallized the transformation. Without the POV, every one of those activations would have been a product pitch. With it, they were chapters in a story the audience was already living.

The Content Co-Creation Engine: Podcast as Trade Show Booth

The mechanism Pablo used to build distribution, validate pain, and create allies simultaneously is deceptively simple: he showed up to industry conferences with cameras and lights, and instead of selling, he interviewed people. He calls it “podcast as trade show booth,” and it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a cheat code for breaking into an industry where you don’t yet have credibility.

Here’s how it works in practice. You show up to a trade show. Instead of a booth with a banner and a fishbowl for business cards, you set up a podcast recording station — lights, cameras, lavalier mics, a couple of tripods. Pablo noted you can do this with nothing more than an iPhone, a tripod, a dual-input adapter, two lav mics, and two LED lights. When you want more production value, you hire a local videographer for their day rate and equipment, and handle post-production in-house. While everyone else at the conference is dodging eye contact with booth vendors, people are drawn to lights and cameras like moths. “When you have lights and cameras and people speaking,” Pablo said, “people are walking by like, ‘Whoa, who’s on TV? Should I know that person?’” Your team intercepts the curious ones, asks what they think about the topic, and invites the best ones on camera.

But the genius of the model isn’t the recording — it’s what happens afterward. Pablo’s offshore editing team in the Philippines turns around sizzle reels for each guest overnight. The next morning, each interviewee gets a professionally edited clip of themselves looking like an industry expert at a major conference. They post it. Their network sees it. Your brand is attached to every single one of those posts. You’ve just created dozens of micro-distribution channels — all pointing back to your narrative — without spending a dollar on ads. And you’ve done it by giving something valuable to people who hold the keys to the doors you want to open, which is Pablo’s operating principle for everything: “Find a way to serve the people with the keys to the doors you want to open.”

Through this content co-creation model, Pablo built relationships with the coaches, advisors, and broker-owners who ran the property management industry’s social ecosystem. He validated the maintenance-and-reviews pain point through dozens of on-camera conversations. And he accumulated enough social capital and borrowed credibility to attempt something most newcomers to an industry could never pull off: taking over the industry’s biggest conference.

Securing the Room: The NARPM Partnership

The most expensive thing about a conference takeover is the space. Pablo got his for free — a 2,400 square foot room at the Broker/Owner conference, provided by NARPM (the National Association of Residential Property Managers) as part of a content partnership. The deal was straightforward: NARPM had educational accreditation programs they wanted to promote. Pablo offered to create content featuring those programs, with Oo sponsoring the production. NARPM got free marketing for their designations. Pablo got a massive room to activate. Neither side paid the other. Both sides got what they needed.

This is borrowed credibility at scale. NARPM’s endorsement — implicit in the partnership — gave Pablo and Oo legitimacy they couldn’t have bought. The space wasn’t branded as “Oo’s booth.” It was branded as the “AI Pavilion,” presented as an industry resource, and positioned as the place where the future of property management was being demonstrated. The distinction matters enormously. A booth says “we’re selling something.” A pavilion says “something important is happening here, and you should be part of it.”

The AI Pavilion: Designing a Transformation

With the room secured five weeks before the conference, Pablo had to activate it. Every element he chose was reverse-engineered from a single “from-to” — the transformation he wanted attendees to experience. He wanted people to walk in thinking “AI is a technology tool” and walk out believing “AI is ready to be hired as a teammate.” That’s the from-to. And it governed every decision.

The space opened with a twenty-foot circular structure displaying quotes about AI — not from Oo executives, but from podcast guests, AI Alliance founders, and figures like Satya Nadella and Tim Cook. The effect was status attribution through association: this isn’t a vendor space, this is where serious people are talking about serious things. Inside, anthropomorphized cardboard cutouts of Oo’s AI agents — designed to look like “daft punk bunnies,” as Pablo described them — greeted visitors with their job titles. A receptionist agent. A troubleshooting agent. A dispatch agent. Attendees could interact with each one at dedicated demo stations, experiencing first-hand what AI-as-teammate actually felt like in practice.

At each demo station, a tablet below the computer ran a Snapchat-style filter that superimposed Oo’s logo onto the visitor’s face — “This is you inside the computer. We’re making an AI version of you.” Playful, memorable, and reinforcing the from-to narrative at every touchpoint. After the demos, visitors were asked a carefully designed research question: “If someone showed up on day one with this skillset and told you they’d keep getting better, never take a day off, never quit, and never be cranky — how would you rate them as a hire?” The results displayed on a screen at the exit: 76% of property managers rated agentic AI as an A-level hiring prospect. Eighteen percent said B-level. Six percent said C. Zero said below average. Pablo had just generated original market research — in real time, at the conference — that told the story he wanted the industry to hear. And every attendee who participated now had a personal stake in the data.

Outside the pavilion, geo-targeted Facebook ads blanketed the conference zip code: “If you want to learn about AI at Broker/Owner, come to the AI Pavilion.” A roaming AI robot photo booth wandered the hallways, taking photos of attendees, generating AI-enhanced portraits, and directing people to the Pavilion to pick up their prints. And eight of Oo’s top evangelist clients received Meta Ray-Ban glasses in the mail before the conference with a personal note: “Since you saw the future and bet on us early, I want you to have the most futuristic glasses in the game.” Those eight clients walked the conference wearing the glasses, fielding questions from curious attendees, and generating organic word-of-mouth that no amount of advertising could replicate.

Total spend: $47,000. The AI Pavilion structure cost $12,000. The robot cost $7,000. Demo stands and production filled out the rest. The 2,400 square foot room was free. And the result was $2.5 million in closed-won revenue in thirty-six hours.

The Principles Behind the Strike

When Pablo stepped back from the story to teach the underlying framework, he identified four principles that made the lightning strike work — and that apply to any concentrated event activation, whether you’re spending $48K at a trade show or $5K on a virtual summit.

Principle 1: Distribution through social validation. Getting butts in seats isn’t enough. You need butts in seats that arrive with trust already built. Pablo’s distribution came from the AI Alliance (whose member companies promoted the Pavilion to their networks), the NARPM partnership (which gave the Pavilion institutional credibility), the podcast guests (who were featured on the circular structure and felt ownership of the space), and the evangelist clients (who wore the Ray-Bans and became walking endorsements). Every channel was socially validated — the audience didn’t discover the Pavilion through an ad. They heard about it from someone they already trusted.

Principle 2: A clear from-to. Pablo emphasized that events without a designed transformation are “just a cool thing that people forget.” Every great story has a journey, and every beat in that journey has its own from-to that advances the larger arc. For the AI Pavilion, the macro transformation was “AI is a tool” to “AI is a teammate.” The demo stations, the hiring question, the real-time survey results, the anthropomorphized agents — each was a beat that moved the attendee one step further along that journey. The constraint of having a single, clear from-to is what made the creativity purposeful rather than scattered.

Principle 3: Wow moments that create word of mouth. The robot. The Ray-Bans. The AI photo filter. The live survey results displayed on a screen. These weren’t gimmicks — they were engineered to be the kind of thing people pull out their phone to photograph and text to a colleague. Pablo allocated budget to moments that would generate organic amplification, not to impressions that would be forgotten by lunch.

Principle 4: A content co-creation engine as the foundation. This is the meta-lesson, and Pablo was emphatic about it: none of the rest was possible without the content co-creation engine he’d built over the preceding months. The podcast interviews created the relationships. The relationships created the partnerships. The partnerships created the distribution. The distribution filled the room. “I cannot understate how valuable it is,” he said. “Having the ability to post-edit content and create content for people — that is the magical juice of distribution and finding alliances and getting that social validation.”

What This Means for You

If you’re a bootstrapped founder stuck at a revenue plateau, the instinct is to spend more on the things that got you here — more ads, more cold outreach, more conference booths. Pablo’s story is a case study in why that instinct is wrong and what the alternative looks like.

The alternative is architecture. Start with a point of view that names a problem your market feels but hasn’t articulated. Use content co-creation — interviews, podcasts, collaborative events — to validate that pain, build relationships with the people who matter in your industry, and create socially validated distribution channels. Then, when the moment is right, concentrate everything into a lightning strike that compresses months of relationship-building into days.

You don’t need $48,000. You need a POV, a camera, and the willingness to serve people with your superpower before you ask for anything in return. The podcast-as-trade-show-booth model costs almost nothing to start. The relationships it builds are worth everything.

As Pablo put it: “Anybody that wants to create a lightning strike or take over a category — you’ve got to figure out how to not just become a publishing engine yourself, but how to empower other people to publish things based on the narrative that you’re telling.”

That’s the content cascade in action. That’s Strike Marketing.

Connect with Pablo Gonzalez: LinkedIn

Until next time — stop being invisible.

— Fernando

P.S. Pablo mentioned that within 12 to 24 months of starting a content co-creation engine — podcasting, side events, panels — any founder will have all the ingredients needed to host their own event. If you’re wondering where to start, that’s the sequence: POV first, then podcast, then partnerships, then your own lightning strike. The path is the same whether you’re in AI, consulting, SaaS, or construction.

The Strike Marketing Summit was amazing. Great speakers. Solid content. But the chat was dead by Day Two.

Rachel’s entire session was about why that happens — and why it has nothing to do with the quality of your content.

WHO RACHEL STARR IS

Rachel Starr is a community strategist and the founder of Co-Creator Society, a membership built for entrepreneurs who are tired of building alone. She’s a Circle Certified Partner who works one-on-one with top creators and organizations to build high-performing community experiences. She’s been running and consulting on virtual summits for over two decades — first as a wedding planner who learned the hard way what experience design actually means, then as a community builder who took those lessons online.

What Rachel shared that day reframed how I think about every design decision a summit host makes — and why the ones that seem smallest often matter most.

THE EXPERIENCE PROBLEM

Rachel started with a diagnosis that, once you hear it, you can’t unsee it.

Most summits fail not because the content was bad, not because the speakers weren’t talented, but because the experience wasn’t designed with actual humans in mind.

She broke it down into four symptoms she sees over and over:

Cognitive overload. Too many sessions, too much information, too many calls to action. Attendees hit a wall by lunchtime. “People don’t remember what they learned,” Rachel said. “They remember how drained they felt.”

Disappearing attendees. People register with good intentions. When the summit feels chaotic or impersonal, their brain says this is too much and they quietly opt out.

Disconnected speakers. Speakers can feel when the room is cold. When there’s no chat energy, when the audience is passive, it affects the delivery. A disengaged room creates disengaged speakers creates disengaged attendees — a loop that compounds fast.

Flat conversions. The one no one likes to talk about. You pour your soul into the thing and the conversion rate looks like a parking lot on a Sunday morning.

None of these are content problems. They’re connection problems.

“Summits fall flat because they’re built around information instead of intention. But the moment you shift your mindset from ‘how do I deliver content’ to ‘how do I create an experience that moves people forward’ — everything changes.”

That sentence is the whole talk, compressed.

THE CONVERSION GAP NOBODY EXPLAINS

Here’s the number Rachel dropped that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: some summits convert 2% of their attendees. Others convert 20%. With the exact same topic, the exact same niche, roughly the same speaker quality.

The variable isn’t content. It’s connection.

When attendees feel connected to the host, to the speakers, to each other — they show up more, they comment more, they stay longer. And engagement, Rachel was clear, is the single best predictor of conversion.

The logic runs deeper than that. Belonging builds trust faster than any other mechanism available to a summit host. When an attendee thinks these are my people or this host actually gets me — the entire relationship with your brand shifts. They’re no longer evaluating your content. They’re inside your world.

And once attendees feel that connection, the summit stops being a three-day event. It becomes the beginning of a long-term relationship — the front door to everything you’re building.

“A summit is not a content strategy. It’s a community strategy. Content informs and community transforms.”

WHAT RACHEL ACTUALLY BUILT

The strongest part of Rachel’s session was the walk-through of her own Co-Creator Growth Summit, which she ran in October — and intentionally used to simultaneously launch her new proprietary app.

Every structural decision she made is worth examining.

One unified hub. Everything lived inside her Circle community, accessible via desktop and her app. No Zoom link buried in email. No patchwork of tools. Attendees watched sessions, joined live panels, and dropped takeaways in chat — all in one branded space. The result: “People kept mentioning how thoughtful the design and their journey was.” Ease is a growth strategy.

Eight to nine sessions per day, roughly 20 minutes each. This wasn’t arbitrary. She designed the session load to be consumable for a free attendee — enough value to keep them engaged daily, not so overwhelming they burned out. The 24-hour access window (after which sessions came down for free attendees) created daily momentum and a natural, non-pushy reason to consider the all-access pass.

Live daily panels as the main connection engine. The prerecorded sessions delivered information. The panels created the actual human energy. Speakers showed up live, attendees interacted in real time, and “the conversations felt dynamic and rooted.” The panels, Rachel said, were where the magic happened — where attendees connected with personalities, not just content.

Daily chat threads with speaker drive-bys. After sessions dropped each morning, a dedicated chat thread opened. Attendees shared takeaways. Speakers popped in throughout the day to respond, connect, and build on what attendees had said. This kept the summit alive and social without requiring in-session chat on every video.

Private podcast feed — for free attendees too. Most summits that offer a podcast feed make it an all-access exclusive. Rachel offered it at 24-hour increments to free attendees as well, so they could listen in the car, on a walk, or during chores. The result: 25% of her total listenership came from the private podcast. It was, she said, their most loved feature by far.

The summit didn’t end on the final day. It rolled directly into open enrollment for the Co-Creator Society — using the momentum, connection, and trust built during the event as the launchpad. Attendees didn’t feel pushed into the membership. They’d already been in Rachel’s world for three days. The invitation felt like a natural next step.

THE CONNECTION-FIRST FRAMEWORK

Rachel pulled everything into a five-part framework she uses with clients. Each element is simple. Together they’re the difference between a summit that generates a list and one that generates a community.

1. Attract aligned speakers. Speakers aren’t just content contributors — they’re what Rachel calls “energy setters, tone carriers, and community builders.” When their values align with yours, their delivery becomes conversational. They want to interact with attendees beyond their session slot. They amplify the event naturally. Speaker alignment is your first lever of connection — and it starts before you even post the application.

2. Design for interaction, not consumption. This is the biggest structural shift. Most summits are designed like online courses: watch this, then that, then this. But interaction is what creates memory, connection, and ultimately conversion. Live panels. Chat threads with reflection prompts. Speaker drive-bys in the comments. “When attendees participate, they become engaged — and engagement is where transformation and conversions happen.”

3. Build one simple home base. “Your summit should feel like a space, not a collection of links.” A unified hub creates psychological safety. When people aren’t confused and aren’t hunting for the next thing, they stay longer, engage more, and feel more connected to the event overall.

4. Create built-in connection moments. And here’s the line I’ll be quoting for years: “People don’t need a 30-minute networking session. They need a 32-second moment of feeling seen.” A speaker replying to someone’s takeaway. The host acknowledging a shared struggle. Someone’s comment being echoed back by a stranger. These are the moments people remember. Design them in deliberately.

5. Use the summit as a launchpad. When attendees feel connected and supported and inspired, the next step becomes obvious. You’re not pitching — you’re leading. “A summit isn’t the finish line. It’s the beginning of the relationship.”

THE THING MOST HOSTS GET BACKWARDS

Rachel mentioned something in the Q&A that I think is the most actionable tactical insight in the whole session: she curates her topics first and reverse-engineers her speakers to match.

Most hosts find great speakers and let them pitch whatever they want to talk about. Rachel defines exactly what she wants covered on each day, writes the session title and description herself, and then recruits speakers to fill those specific slots — with a speaker agreement that spells out what they can and cannot do.

The effect is a summit that stays on brand, attracts exactly the right audience, and converts at the rates she needs — because every element of the content was designed backward from the community she’s trying to build, not forward from whoever agreed to speak.

“I curated all of that with the thought process of: this is my ideal member inside the Society, and this is the content they want to know.”

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

If you’re planning a summit, or you’ve run one that didn’t convert the way you hoped, the diagnosis Rachel offers is clarifying:

The problem almost certainly isn’t your topic, your speakers, or your production quality. It’s that the experience wasn’t designed to create the moments of connection that move people from attendee to believer.

Two things to do before you build anything else:

Start with the community you want to grow — not the sessions you want to run. Who do you want in the room? What do you want them to feel? Where does the summit lead? Design outward from those answers.

Then plan connection moments before you plan content. Where will people interact? How will attendees be seen — not just educated? How will speakers engage beyond their session? Build those moments into the structure first. The content fills in around them.

One more thing Rachel said that Marcus needs to hear: “People don’t remember how many sessions you had. They remember how your summit made them feel.”

That feeling is a design choice. Make it deliberately.

Rachel Starr: [Connect with her on LinkedIn] | Co-Creator Society: [cocreatorhq.com] | Community at Heart podcast: available wherever you listen

Ready to talk through how to design your summit for connection from the ground up? Book a free 30-minute strategy call

— Fernando Labastida Founder, Strike Marketing Institute

P.S. Rachel also walked through her exact summit marketing timeline (1-month runway, speaker promotion accountability tracked publicly inside her community, Deadline Funnel sequence for immediate upsell on registration), her speaker agreement template, and how she's built a membership community that people actually stay in. The full replay is available for summit registrants.

This article is a recap of Chris Stanley’s session at the Strike Marketing Summit on December 12, 2024. Chris is the founder of IA Path and Mini Book Publishing, the author of 21 Amazon bestsellers, and the architect of a $700K/year online business he runs from a sailboat. His new book, Mini Book Flywheel*, drops in January 2026. Get his free mini books at minibookpublishing.com/free.*

On December 12th, the Strike Marketing Summit audience heard a line that reframes everything:

“Funnels cash in on belief, but flywheels are what actually create the belief in the first place.”

That’s Chris Stanley — founder of Mini Book Publishing, author of 21 Amazon bestsellers, and the man who built a $700,000-per-year online education business from a sailboat in Florida, starting with a 10,000-word book he wrote about insurance adjusting. His revenue has held at that level for three consecutive years. Not through ads, not through a breakthrough launch, not through a viral moment. Through a flywheel.

When Chris finished, I thought: this is the session that explains why so many great founders stay stuck. Not because they’re bad at marketing. Because they’re running the right tool against the wrong problem.

“Funnels Cash In on Belief. Flywheels Create It.”

Here’s the distinction in plain terms.

Imagine someone is fed up sleeping on their old mattress. They search “Purple Mattress” on Google, meaning to buy it. You’ve placed an ad on that search for your competing mattress. They click. Maybe they buy. You’ve just made a sale — but you didn’t create any belief. You borrowed it. The buyer already believed a new mattress would fix their sleep. You funneled their existing conviction toward your brand.

That’s what funnels do. And Chris is clear: funnels are not the enemy. “Sales funnels are valuable. I make money with sales pages and upsells and downsells... but they cash in on belief. And most of us don’t have any belief yet. That’s why we’re not making any money with our sales page.”

The problem is that bootstrapped founders in new categories are trying to use a belief-conversion tool when they don’t have any belief to convert yet. “Maybe we’re creating new categories, and so we’re trying to create belief in something that does not even exist yet. Funnels cannot do that. You have to have a flywheel to create belief.”

This is the whole talk in two sentences. Everything else is the mechanism.

The Three Problems Every Founder Faces — In Sequence

Before Chris got to the solution, he named the three problems that stop founders from getting traction. Most founders experience these as one undifferentiated struggle — “my marketing isn’t working.” Chris breaks them apart so you can see exactly where you’re stuck.

Problem 1: The Credibility Crisis

Chris started IA Path (his insurance adjuster education company) in 2016. Before he wrote his first book, people were attacking him on LinkedIn. “Who are you to give advice? Have you even ever done this job before? What’s your adjuster license number?” He had the expertise. He had done the job. He just had no proof that the market could recognize.

That’s the credibility crisis: the gap between what you know and what the world believes about you. It’s not a confidence problem. It’s an evidence problem. “No one trusts you. If someone won’t spend $3,000 with you even though you can help them make $10,000 — that’s why. They don’t believe you.”

Problem 2: The Tornado Trap

In his attempt to solve the credibility crisis, Chris did what almost everyone does: he launched things. “I probably sold 10 products that year. Well, didn’t really sell many of them, but I tried to sell at least 10 different products and services that first year and I was so burnt out. Everything I applied was very short-lived. Nothing really seemed to take.”

Chris compares sales funnels to tornadoes. They have a lot in common. Tornadoes spin up fast — they generate enormous energy almost instantly. They also die fast. A really long-lasting tornado stays on the ground for 10 minutes. Most last 30 seconds. The trap is that every new launch feels like it could be the breakthrough. You change the button color, rework the headline, try a different traffic source. But the underlying problem — belief — hasn’t been solved.

“A tornado is not a weather system. It’s a part of a weather system. It has borrowed energy.” Funnels borrow demand that already exists in the market. If you don’t have an existing category with established demand, there’s nothing to borrow from.

Problem 3: Category Confusion

The third problem is the subtlest and most damaging in the long run. If people can’t clearly identify what you are, they don’t remember you — and they don’t buy from you.

Chris’s test is simple: “If you’re especially a one-person solopreneur, and someone can say, ‘oh, you’re the blank guy’ or ‘blank gal’ — you’re on track. But if that isn’t there, you’re not making it.” He’s the mini book guy. Fernando is the strike marketing guy. If someone can’t complete that sentence for your business, you have a category confusion problem.

Category confusion usually masquerades as a messaging problem. It’s actually a positioning problem at the category level. You haven’t staked out a clear space, named it, and given the market a way to remember you for it.

Tornadoes vs. Hurricanes: Choosing Your Weather System

Chris is obsessed with weather — a natural consequence of living on a sailboat in Florida and spending years as a catastrophic insurance adjuster who got deployed after storms. The meteorology metaphor isn’t decorative; it comes from someone who actually watches hurricanes form.

Tornadoes: form fast, intense but brief, small impact area. Hurricane Dorian in 2019 stalled over The Bahamas for an entire day and never made landfall in the US — yet its impact zone was as big as the state of Florida. “That hurricane was as big as Florida. Massive impact area.”

Business tornadoes (funnels) can generate a burst of sales. But they require constant new energy — new traffic, new creative, new campaigns — because they die fast. Hurricanes (flywheels) build slowly and sustain themselves. The impact compounds over time rather than dissipating.

And here’s the detail most people miss: when a hurricane makes landfall, it spawns its own tornadoes. “Hurricanes when they land... actually throw out their own tornadoes. So a lot of times the most devastated areas are from tornadoes that spun up from the hurricane.” Funnels aren’t bad — they’re just most powerful when they spin up from a flywheel that’s already in motion. The sequence matters: build the belief first, then cash in with funnels.

The Five Elements of a Hurricane-Strength Flywheel

Chris walks through what it takes for a flywheel to actually form and sustain. Just like a hurricane needs certain conditions to develop in the Atlantic, a business flywheel needs five elements:

1. Market need — warm water. Wade into the internet and look for the questions, frustrations, and unmet desires your audience is already expressing. Chris heard the same question 300 times in his first year: “That’s great, but how do I actually get work in this industry?” It took him 300 repetitions to recognize it. “It took 300 times for me to go, ‘oh, that’s what they want.’ And I wrote that book and that became the flywheel.”

2. A powerful point of view — the low-pressure center. “It’s a unique perspective that pulls attention. Like a bowling ball on a trampoline that sags right and everything rolls toward it.” Your POV isn’t a positioning statement. It’s a deep shift in how someone thinks about the problem — a way of seeing things that makes them want to hear more.

3. Consistent messaging — the rotation. If you change topics every week, the energy dissipates. If you repeat the same core ideas in different ways over time, the storm starts to spin. People start associating the language with you.

4. Belief echo — the acceleration. This is when people start repeating your message back to you — sharing your content, citing your framework, referring others to you because you’re “the blank guy.” At this stage, the flywheel feeds itself.

5. Category clarity — the eye of the storm. “If you’ve ever seen drone footage inside a hurricane — it’s violent, violent, violent, and then you go in and suddenly it’s calm and it’s clear. You feel that as a business owner when it hits.” Category clarity is when people instantly understand what you do, what you stand for, and why it matters.

How to Build It: Idea → Identity → Impact

Once you know what a flywheel is, the question is where to start. Chris breaks the build into three stages:

Idea — You need a person, a problem, and a POV. “I help blank solve blank by blank.” For Chris at IA Path: “I help new independent insurance adjusters solve the experience requirements with virtual mentorships and certifications.” Simple. Not clever. Just clear.

And here’s his best piece of advice on finding your POV: “Your POV should be how you solved your problem. If you’re helping someone solve a problem that you solved, your POV is: here’s how to solve the problem. This is not some fabricated thing that comes out of nowhere.”

Identity — This is where the mini book comes in. You name the category, build a framework for it, and claim it with the book. For Chris, it was a seven-step roadmap to becoming an independent insurance adjuster. Not theoretical — the literal steps he took, refined from interviews with others in the industry.

The book does something a bio, a website, or a sales page never can: it makes you an author. And Chris pointed out the etymology: “Author has what? Authority. ‘Author’ is the root word of ‘authority.’” When you hand someone a book, the dynamic changes. “People talk to you different.”

His own book at IA Path was his entire business model, made tangible: “People would ask, what do you do for me? And I’d say, well, here it is — it’s the book. You can do it yourself, or you can hire me to do it with or for you. That was it.”

Impact — The flywheel in motion. From the mini book, content spirals out — social posts, additional books on each chapter, video courses on the questions that keep coming up. That content drives conversations. Those conversations convert to customers. And those customers provide testimonials, referrals, and case studies that reload the engine.

“It’s not complicated, it’s not always sexy, but it’s effective. For me, it’s what allowed me to maintain this over nine years.”

What This Means for Founders Building New Categories

Everything Chris shared reinforces what we teach at Strike Marketing: you cannot shortcut belief. Category design is the starting point — and the mini book (what we call the Startup Book in the Strike Marketing Model) is how you plant your category flag and give the market a reason to believe you’re the one who belongs there.

Chris’s revenue trajectory shows what this looks like in practice: 2016, nothing. 2017, $20,000. Then the flywheel started: a book, consistent messaging, belief echoing back, category clarity forming. By the time it fully compounded, $700K/year — for three consecutive years — running from a sailboat.

If you’ve been stuck in the cycle of launches that spike and die, the tornado trap is real. The problem isn’t your funnel, your copy, or your button color. The problem is that you’re trying to cash in on belief you haven’t created yet. A flywheel builds that belief. And the fastest flywheel Chris has ever found starts with a 10,000-word book you could write this week.

The starting point: write down how you solved the problem you help others solve. Map it into steps. Give it a name. That’s your POV. That’s your book. That’s the center of your flywheel.

Chris’s free mini books — including The Mini Book Model, which he wrote in three days and which remains his most popular and highest-rated book in the series — are at minibookpublishing.com/free. His new book, Mini Book Flywheel, goes to everyone on that list the moment it’s finalized.

— Fernando

P.S. More Summit recaps coming. Stay tuned for sessions on building an event engine that drives 700% growth, why founder-led content is the ultimate competitive advantage, and what it actually takes to run a virtual summit that generates 500–1,000 leads without ad spend.