The marketing philosophy behind everything I do

What is marketing?

Marketing is the process of reaching and converting customers. If you can get in front of the right people, and then convince them to buy your thing, you win.

Why is marketing important? When you have more demand than supply, it’s hard not to win.

The mental model I like to give people is this: imagine I tripled the number of leads coming into your business. What would happen? If you’re a decent business owner, your business would probably grow.

In an age where AI can create pretty much anything, the ability to create distribution, to make yourself oversubscribed with demand, is only getting more powerful.

When you do marketing right:

• •Strangers DM you asking about a problem you posted about weeks ago
• •Prospects bring up your posts on calls before you even pitch
• •Other founders start asking how you’re getting inbound
• •Your best customers found you through a post, not a referral

So that’s step one: understanding what marketing is. Step two is realizing there are actually 2 types of demand.

Future demand vs. current demand

What’s the likelihood you buy a new car in the next 2 weeks? Probably low. What about in the next 20 years? Probably a lot higher.

My goal isn’t to right hook you right now. It’s to increase your affinity to my brand so that when you enter the buying window, you think of my brand first.

There are 2 types of demand: current demand and future demand. Current demand is getting you to use our product or service now. Future demand is the amount of possible demand your brand could have in the future.

Most people view marketing as capturing current demand, because it’s easy to track and attribute, so we allocate more of our time there. Traditional marketers call this direct response marketing.

Let’s talk about creating future demand first, then capturing current demand.

How to create future demand

Future demand is the byproduct of brand.

Brand is the association between two things: one you know about, and one you don’t know about yet. Branding is teaching. If I point at a tree and say “tree,” kids will associate the tree with the sound “tree.”

Bad branding is when your audience makes the associations for you. Good branding is when your audience associates you with the things you want to be associated with. So ask yourself: what do you need to be associated with for your audience to want to buy from you?

My favorite way to build these associations is a framework I call PTL: Power, Trust, Likeness.

Power

Power is your ability to affect change in the world, showing that you have what others want. That could be money, cars, a mansion. It could be your network, your skill set, your results.

Power is relative. A bartender has power in the bar, because they control who gets a drink and how fast. Once they step outside the bar, that power is gone.

A famous investor has power in a meeting with founders, because the founders want their money. But that same investor has low power compared to the coach at a kids’ soccer game.

You can show power 2 main ways:

• •Verbally (“Last year my portfolio did $250m in revenue”)
• •Visually (a picture of your big building)

Trust

Trust is the belief that following your direction will produce a good result.

Trust comes from evidence. Belief without evidence is faith. Trust is built when I tell you to do something, you do it, and a good thing happens. Each time that happens, the likelihood you comply with me in the future goes up.

Parents have high trust with their kids because they’ve spent years giving directions that produced good results. Eat your vegetables and you’ll grow. Wear sunscreen and you won’t burn. Don’t talk to strangers and you’ll stay safe.

Martha Stewart has high trust with her audience because for decades she’s given step-by-step directions, her recipes, that produced good results in their kitchens. If you follow her cake recipe and it comes out right, the next time she shares a recipe, you’ll go grab your flour.

Likeness

Likeness is how similar you are to the person you’re trying to influence.

In psychology, this is called the in-group effect. An in-group is a social group an individual identifies with. People show favoritism, trust, and empathy toward members of their in-group, and skepticism or bias toward people outside it. That similarity shows up 2 ways:

• •Physical attributes (how someone looks, how they dress, their age)
• •Values (what they believe, where they’re from, what they care about, how they speak)

To build an influential brand, demonstrate those 3 things, power, trust, and likeness, over and over and over again.

A note on going viral

Going viral does matter. People often say you only need 1,000 true fans to make a living online.

Sure, but your first 1,000 followers are not going to be your first 1,000 true fans. You’re probably going to have to get to 10,000 or 100,000 followers and nurture them into fans.

There are 2 approaches:

• •Stay super niche, only talk about one thing, and become known for that one thing, only reaching the people who are interested in it right now
• •Be yourself, reach many people, educate them about your interests, raise their awareness level, and turn them into customers over time

Personally, I’d rather build cities than one skyscraper. I think you have more fun, can do it for longer, and build a more durable brand.

Why brand matters

We all know a business survives because of one equation: LTV to CAC. Basically, how much does it cost to acquire a customer, and how much do you make from them over their lifetime? The best businesses have a high LTV:CAC ratio.

You know what increases that ratio? Brand.

On the CAC side:

• •Increases the number of leads you get (one piece of content can reach millions of people)
• •Increases the conversion rate of those leads (they feel like they already know, like, and trust you, they’re pre-sold)

On the LTV side:

• •Customers are willing to pay more, buy more frequently, and stay longer (they give you the benefit of the doubt)

And here’s a 201-level benefit for the more advanced business owners: brand also improves your LTGPPE-to-CAT ratio, your lifetime gross profit per employee versus your cost to acquire talent.

• •You get more talent
• •Higher-quality talent
• •For cheaper
• •That stay longer
• •And are already pre-sold into your beliefs and values

The content multiplication system

What do all the top personal brands have in common? They’re prolific.

I learned this lesson from Noah Kagan. When I was 17, I worked as his head of content. He’d always repeat this phrase: test, then invest.

Our north star goal was growing his email newsletter ahead of his book launch. So we asked: of the platforms we’re posting on, which one is driving the most email subscribers? Why don’t we double down on that?

On X, of the content we’re posting, which formats are driving the most email subscribers? Why don’t we double down on that?

And if we’re going to double down, how do we test before we invest? We’d post tweets, see what worked, then expand the winners into Twitter threads.

That’s how the content multiplication system was born. This is how I still run my content today:

• •I tweet 4 to 10 times a day (idea playground)
• •My AI assistant Stanley flags which tweets outperform our average
• •I take that tweet and find 4 to 5 others like it and post them as an Instagram carousel
• •I voice-note it, clean it up, and post it as a long-form article or LinkedIn post
• •If that article does well, I clean it up further and send it as a newsletter
• •If that newsletter does well, I turn it into a YouTube video
• •I take the audio and put it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

I also repost my bangers every 90 days, and rewrite or remix them with other bangers to create new mega-bangers:

• •Same idea, new format
• •New idea, same format

By year 5 or 6, you’re mostly playing your best hits, just like singers do. Now you have a compounding machine, and people call you lucky.

The way to do this:

• •Hall of fame
• •Repost
• •Remix
• •Repurpose

If you master this skill, the world is yours. But making content is only half the equation. Now let’s talk about how to get paid today, how to capture current demand.

How to capture current demand

Organic content is great for creating future demand and getting people aware of you. Direct response, or ads, is where you right hook your audience.

Organic content widens the outer circle, the number of people who are aware of you. Paid ads widen the inner circle, the number of people who actually buy from you.

The goal of your content is to educate your audience about a problem they may have. The goal of your ads is to speak to the people who already have that problem.

When you write ads, talk more about pain aversion than promise. If you can articulate someone’s pain better than they can, they’ll believe you have the ability to solve it. Focus on their pain, not your pitch.

Here’s a pro tip: some of the best ads I’ve ever produced came from downloading all the sales calls of customers who bought our product and using AI to analyze why they bought. Then we used their exact words and said them back to the customer in the ads.

So if they bought because they wanted:

• •More freedom to travel the world
• •A career with uncapped upside
• •More flexibility to be with their kids

Then we’d say those things back to them in the ads:

That’s the empathy map: pulling the exact language your customers already use and mirroring it back to them.

Hooks are the 80/20 of the ad. Battle-test your hooks by recording multiple, then kaleidoscoping them with a body. One tip we’ve found: specificity (like “$1m a year”) plus scarcity (like “invite to HQ for a private workshop”) wins.

Where do winning hooks come from?

• •Your previous ads
• •Your free content
• •Other people’s ads
• •Other people’s free content
• •Platform-specific ad libraries

The body of the ad, what I call the meat, usually falls into one of 3 buckets:

• •Testimonial ads (podcast style, parade of proof, lifecycle ad, raw testimonial, walk-and-talk rant style)
• •Education ads (like whiteboard explainer ads)
• •Story ads (lifestyle ads and straight storytelling)

And the CTA needs to answer:

• •What to do
• •How to do it
• •When to do it
• •What they get for doing it
• •What happens next (optional)

How they play together

Brand makes the circle bigger. Direct response converts the 1%. It’s no longer organic versus paid. It’s explore with organic, exploit with paid.

My own content strategy comes down to finding underpriced opportunities. Sahil was first to Twitter threads. Hormozi was first to reels. Substack has notes. Right now, I’m treating LinkedIn like Twitter, posting 3 times a day, because the format is underpriced there.

A hot take on branding

I’ve been told I need to make my visual background more memorable, that I should wear the same color shirt so people recognize me. Those hacks and gimmicks are not branding. They’re easy to do, and easy to “deconstruct” into breakdown videos.

But Hormozi isn’t Hormozi because of his nose strips or his flannels. His audience cares about those details because they feel deeply influenced by him. How? Power, trust, likeness.

If you want to apply this to your own business

A few questions worth sitting with:

• •If I tripled your leads, what would happen?
• •What do you need to be associated with?
• •How can you demonstrate power? What does your audience want, internally and externally?
• •How can you demonstrate trust? What step-by-step directions can you give them?
• •How can you demonstrate likeness? What are their internal and external attributes?
• •How are you going to leverage one piece of content into many?
• •What’s in your hall of fame?
• •Have you transcribed your sales calls to find out why people actually buy?
• •Have you built an empathy map?
• •What are your winning hooks?
• •What’s an underpriced opportunity you could be first to?

Recap

There are 2 types of demand: current and future. To create future demand, demonstrate power, trust, and likeness. Brand improves your LTV to CAC. Use the content multiplication system to be prolific. Run ads that target pain to capture current demand.

This is how you win in marketing in 2027 and beyond.