Why "The Manifest" exists

Content has gotten sloppy.

I don’t just mean “AI slop” either… even though that is a major contributing factor.

The ability to generate content at scale and cover topics in days that in aggregate would have previously taken months has caused business leaders to have a volume mindset — with lost sight on the end-goal.

Especially in fast-moving industries like SaaS and AI (which are moving faster than ever and only accelerating), the “hack something together faster than it used to be done to gain some ground” loop has become faster than a runaway Turbo Diesel engine.

The treadmill is accelerating, but most marketing motions were already running at full speed.

Executives, business leaders, and founders all are looking to expand their top line, and improve their bottom line — this will always be true, and AI is an incredible boon in this area — but it’s being utilized wrong, in most cases.

I want The Manifest to exist to give a honed, experienced, nuanced, and real view of the factors, strategies, and tactics that drive success in GTM motions using AI. It’s for founders, executives, business leaders, marketers, sales teams, and anyone looking to improve their performance with modern marketing motions, specifically with AI.operations.

I’m not here to peddle garbage, or generate a hundred posts per month for you to try to keep up with — I’m here to give you real knowledge and craft earned through hard work and many years of experience and testing — and to potentially work with you to implement it.

That said, I need to tell you this up-front so I don’t sound like a dinosaur shouting into the void — AI is not bad for marketing, sales, GTM, or expanding revenue opportunities — it’s one of the greatest aids in this arena ever. It is currently and will continue to transform the game in ways we probably can’t even conceive right now.

How AI is being utilized, however, is where the moat will be excavated.

And let me tell you, I’ve got my digger running full-blast.

I see it everywhere right now — marketers using AI to target algorithms, not people.

Generating fluff en masse that doesn’t convert, only muddies signals. Just because the volume & speed wasn’t possible before doesn’t mean it’s the right play now.

Marketers using AI solely in pursuit of gaming algorithms will only saturate markets with worthless garbage. It won’t convert, won’t generate revenue, and won’t drive pipeline for businesses — which is what the business leaders who hire them ultimately want.

That said business leaders also see these “opportunities” and dive headlong into them, even demand them of people who have the experience to know better.

Marketers using AI and automation to better understand people — their needs, their wants, their unique circumstances, their drivers, their motivations — and then applying that knowledge in interesting ways to create truly unique content that solves their needs, however, will rise to the top.

These marketers are the ones ironically creating content that is referenced more by AI and all across search, and drive real meaningful pipeline better than any spray and pray approach ever could.

By the way, they’re also using AI to do this. They’re just more experienced, nuanced, and attentive in their approach.

I also hear a lot lately that “strategy is a commodity” now because Claude and Perplexity can do such great market research on their own in minutes and while this is partly true, I think it’s also very short sighted. I think people often misunderstand strategy and experience with data and market information.

Data and market information (which is important to verify beyond hallucinations) is becoming more of a commodity, while proprietary data (from a marketing standpoint) is like a solid gold vein.

True strategy and experience on the other hand, I believe, is at more of a premium than ever before.

I believe that strategy, tenacity, curiosity, and (most importantly) experience are actually the superpowers of this AI era — today and in the future.

There’s a few more though.

The super powers of the AI search era:

• Strategy: the ability to see the market, see the landscape, and chart a course that is purely unique but intrinsically linked to the core customer need so that it feels obvious to the customer, and in retrospect seems obvious to the competition when they’re annoyed with themselves that they didn’t see it first.

• Tenacity: the persistence to not be defeated, even in the exhausting, tumultuous, unstable, and rapidly changing AI market we’re in — those that keep pushing will come out ahead in the end, those that give up will fall behind more rapidly than ever before.

• Curiosity: the interest to flip things over, poke holes in things, see how they work, test things, try new tools, connect things, experiment, pay for multiple tools that seemingly do the same thing in parallel to see which does something better and why. Things are changing so quickly that you have to be interested and learning, without that you won’t be able to keep up.

• Experience: most importantly is the experience to take all of the strategic direction you have charted, all of the market research and customer needs that you have accumulated, and to intuit that into the most practical, down to earth, results-driven tenacious curiosity possible to pull together opportunities that actually drive the real results — with the ability to filter out the waste before you ever try to tap into it.

You can get your market data and information in minutes now from tools that cost $20-100/month when that used to cost tens of thousands — but the strategy to know where to take your business based on that information, or the tenacity to keep pushing and trying, and the curiosity to find new opportunities along that road, with the experience to know what roads to avoid altogether is still not something you can easily replace or automate.

Execution is infinitely more easy to automate now than strategy, but you still need the experience to know where to apply that, curiosity to find the best ways to make it work, and tenacity to keep pushing.

The rules of the game never changed:

1. Get clarity (ICP, customer needs, customer wants, customer pains)

2. Solve the problems (Create the solution — the product or service)

3. Understand awareness (Channels, tendencies, routines)

4. Distribute the solution (Get in front of the customers, make them care, get signups)

Sounds easy, I know.

Everyone reading this probably just rolled their eyes because it’s obviously not easy. Every part of that chain has pitfalls and a million different wrong directions that can be walked.

That’s also why Make Reality exists, to find the bottlenecks and create real solutions to automate success at scale across all of those steps, to help businesses make the new reality.

Through doing so I learn so much. I have also learned so much already throughout my career, and I love to share that knowledge. I’ve been featured on Forbes, Inc, TheNextWeb, and a ton of blogs in the industries I’ve contributed to. I’ve lead talks to hundreds of business leaders, and I’ve consulting thousands of highly successful companies at this point. I have seen a lot, but far from everything.

I’m committed to staying humble, staying hungry, and forever being tenaciously curious about what makes good marketing work — what drives real business outcomes, and how to connect real customer needs with the products that make those needs evaporate.

In The Manifest I want to share my experience, I want to share my curiosity, I want to share my strategies, and I also plan to be tenacious and to keep pushing while doing so.

If you’re interested in that, and you feel like you’d like to follow along for the journey — subscribe.

I’m only going to post and email when I think it’s worth it to you.

How will I know?

If it would have been worth it to me — if it helped drive real success for one of my clients, or in one of my businesses, or I’ve seen it have a direct positive effect elsewhere — that’s when I’ll know it’s worth sharing.

Lessons, learnings, stories, strategies, tactics, tools, opportunities, opinions — all of that is on the table, all in the form of essays written here (by hand).

Keep curious, keep pushing.

Let’s go.