The archive

Here’s what I’ve gathered

दर्शन

Darśana · seeing

54 pieces, distilled from a working vault. Filter by movement or by the subject they were filed under.

Featured insight · today

Comedy Beats Earnestness When You're Selling Restraint

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I spent a day writing four comedy ad scripts instead of the explainer video I'd been planning for months, and the positioning problem I'd been stuck on solved…

Marketing · 3 min

—FiltersMovement is the editorial cut. Subject is how the piece was filed in the vault.
Movement
Subject

54 pieces · one featured above

  1. A Bot Nobody Can Pass Is a Broken BriefI rolled out the practice simulator to a client's customer-facing team — about a dozen people. Over eleven days they made 124 recorded practice calls. The…Sales5 min
  2. A Bridge Fee Cannot Quietly Carry a Delivery TeamI spent an evening modelling three shapes for the same client relationship, and the useful output was not the model. It was noticing that I had been about to…Entrepreneurship4 min
  3. A Demo Is a Re-Audition When They Have Already Said NoI was brokering a partnership between two clients of mine. One had built an internal tool for a technical operations problem. The other was a services firm…Sales5 min
  4. A Plan With Nothing Logged Is Not MomentumI rebuilt a client's demand plan around buyer journeys instead of disconnected activities, and it is the best version of that artefact I have made. Fifty-five…Marketing5 min
  5. A Power User Is Not a CapabilityThere's a measure from software engineering called the truck factor: the number of people who would have to be hit by a truck before a project stops. If the…Leadership4 min
  6. A Search Box Is Not an AssistantI ran my own assistant against seventeen real questions — the kind I actually ask at nine in the morning, not demo questions. Two answers were good. Seven were…Artificial Intelligence5 min
  7. Account-Based Marketing & B2B Demand Generation: A Field GuideMost of what I've learned about B2B marketing can be compressed into a single uncomfortable truth: **you are not marketing to a company, and you are not…Marketing7 min
  8. Bootstrapped Bookkeeping: The Hygiene Checks That Catch Real RiskI run my own books, which means the person who spends the money is also the person who reconciles it. That dual role is efficient, but it hides two specific…Finance2 min
  9. Build vs Buy: Execution Layers Are for Buying, Governance Layers Are for OwningI keep running into the same decision while building an AI product: when a capability shows up as a vendor - fast, cheap, already working - is it a component…Tech2 min
  10. Building a Content Engine: Ideas, Retention, Consistency & CommunityGrowing an audience looks like creativity from the outside and turns out to be a *system* on the inside. The creators who build real communities aren't more…Communities2 min
  11. Building a Demand Engine: Positioning, Audience Research & ReferralsA "marketing plan" used to feel like a deliverable to me — a document you make so it exists. It isn't. It's an engine: a few connected parts that, when tuned,…Marketing3 min
  12. Building Software & Apps: From Engineering Principles to Flutter & No-CodeI've built software by writing every line, by composing pre-made components, and by not writing code at all. They look different but they rest on the same…Code3 min
  13. Built Is Not Sent, and Sent Is Not ReceivedAn assistant told me an invoice was eighteen days overdue. I opened the accounting system. It had been paid in full three weeks earlier, down to the tax…Artificial Intelligence9 min
  14. Content, Storytelling & Organic Growth: What Actually Holds AttentionI've made content that died in silence and content that compounded for months. The difference was almost never production quality. It was whether I understood…Marketing5 min
  15. Data Systems Foundations: Databases & AlgorithmsYou can go a surprisingly long way in data work without understanding what's underneath — until the day you can't. Two foundations repay the effort more than…Data Science4 min
  16. Design Principles: Minimalism, UI Fundamentals & the Developer HandoffDesign looks like taste from the outside and turns out to be mostly *process* on the inside. The best designers I've learned from don't have better instincts…Design3 min
  17. Equity Should Be Earned In, Not Handed OverAn established software firm approached a compliance venture I advise. They were preparing for a public listing and wanted a strategic stake in exchange for…Entrepreneurship4 min
  18. Flow Is Not Proof of PriorityI have just had eight consecutive days of genuinely good creative output. In the same eight days I did not touch a single item on my financial admin list — a…Entrepreneurship3 min
  19. Forming an Operations Team That ScalesOperations is where good intentions go to die at scale. A team that runs beautifully at ten people can quietly fall apart at fifty — not because anyone got…Leadership2 min
  20. From Markets to a Real Operating Plan: Economics & Financial ModelingEconomics gets taught as theory and used as intuition. The two ends of it that matter most to me are the most micro (how prices and quantities actually move in…Economics4 min
  21. Getting Paid Is a Design ProblemI have spent months treating late payment as a relationship problem. Chase harder, word the reminder better, book another call with the person who can unstick…Finance5 min
  22. Hide It in the UI and You Have Hidden NothingI was building a small internal tool for a client's sales team. Four roles, each of which should see a different slice: a leader who sees everything, managers…Tech4 min
  23. If You Can Name Your Readers, the Funnel Is the Wrong ShapeI spent an afternoon rebuilding my personal positioning and came out with two changes that look unrelated and are actually the same decision made twice.Marketing4 min
  24. Lessons on Strategy, Self-Knowledge & Connection (via a Board Game)Some of the most useful frameworks for living don't come from self-help books. They come from a board game, from noticing how you actually learn, and from a…Life4 min
  25. Machine Learning Foundations: The Mental Models That Make It ClickMachine learning stops being intimidating the moment you realise it's a small set of ideas wearing a lot of math. These are the mental models that made it…Machine Learning5 min
  26. Natural Language Processing FoundationsNatural Language Processing is how machines make sense of human language — and underneath the modern magic of large language models sits a foundation of older,…Natural language Processing3 min
  27. Negotiating Contracts as a Solo FounderOver one week I went from receiving a corporate work agreement with an uncapped liability clause to a signed contract with a cap I could live with. Along the…Entrepreneurship6 min
  28. One Constitution and Many Airgapped DerivativesIf you run more than one brand — a product, a services arm, a personal name — you will eventually face a choice about how their stories relate. Most people…Marketing4 min
  29. Performance Marketing on Paid Social: Brand, Algorithm & the Core-4Paid advertising is where I learned that "spending money to get attention" and "buying profitable growth" are completely different skills. Anyone can do the…Marketing5 min
  30. Pitching, Persuasion & Handling the NoThe fastest way to ruin a pitch is to make it about you. Almost everything I've learned about selling comes back to a single inversion: **the customer is the…Sales6 min
  31. Prompt Engineering: Getting Real Output From AIMost people treat AI like a search engine and then wonder why the results are mediocre. The reframe that changed everything for me: **prompts are instructions,…Artificial Intelligence3 min
  32. Prospecting: How to Keep a Pipeline That Never Runs DryProspecting is the part of sales everyone wants to avoid and nobody can escape. It's supposed to be hard — if you had a choice between prospecting and swimming…Sales6 min
  33. Putting AI to Work: Automating the Repetitive Parts of Knowledge WorkThe most valuable thing reasoning AI does isn't writing essays — it's quietly eating the repetitive research-and-synthesis work that fills people's days. I…Artificial Intelligence3 min
  34. Python Fundamentals: The Parts That Matter EarlyPython was the first language that didn't feel like fighting the computer — and that's by design. If you're starting out, a handful of fundamentals carry…Python3 min
  35. Review Is the Wrong Place to Discover a RequirementTwo things went sideways in the same week, on two unrelated pieces of creative work, and it took me until the second one to notice they were the same failure.Design4 min
  36. Running a Lean Team: Delegation, Incentives & Staying Close to the WorkBuilding a company young teaches you things in the wrong order. You learn the lesson, then you understand why it mattered, usually after it's already cost you.…Entrepreneurship3 min
  37. Self-Mastery: How to Study, Master the Mind & See ClearlySelf-mastery sounds grand, but in practice it's three smaller skills: learning efficiently, understanding what shapes your state of mind, and being able to see…Self help4 min
  38. The Craft of Cold Email & Outbound: How to Start Conversations With StrangersI've sent a lot of cold email — enough to watch it fail in ways no dashboard could explain, and enough to learn what actually makes a stranger reply. The…Sales5 min
  39. The Data Science Workflow: From Messy Data to DecisionsThe glamorous part of data science is the model. The *real* job is everything before it. The unglamorous truth I keep relearning: **most of the work — and most…Data Science3 min
  40. The Fallback That Outlived Its PurposeA page on my site spent weeks rendering the wrong data, and at no point did anything look broken.Tech3 min
  41. The Formula for Irresistible Video HooksIn video, the hook isn't part of the work — it *is* the work. You have about four seconds in short-form, a minute or two in long-form, and if you lose people…Video Production3 min
  42. The Freelancer's Playbook: Skills, Pricing & ContractsI went from earning very little as a teenager to a real income in a few years by freelancing — and the lessons that got me there are unglamorous and…Entrepreneurship3 min
  43. The Positioning Doc That Wasn't MineI was reviewing the positioning document for my own product when I noticed something off about a paragraph. Then the paragraph after it. Then the section.Entrepreneurship2 min
  44. The Repo-as-Bridge Second BrainFor years my best thinking lived in a notes tool my AI couldn't see. Every session started with a paste-a-wall-of-context ritual, and the quality of the output…Tech3 min
  45. The Simulator Told Me What No Real Call WouldI scored 19 out of 100 on a sales call.Sales4 min
  46. Tooling Before Signal Is Procrastination With a Commit HistoryI wrote a rule into a ninety-day plan this week and I want it on the record before I talk myself out of it:Entrepreneurship3 min
  47. Transparency Is Not DeliveryI committed a fixed block of consulting days to a client for the month. I delivered roughly a tenth of them.Leadership7 min
  48. Validating a Startup: The Lean Canvas & the Truth About Venture CapitalMost startup ideas die not because they were bad, but because nobody pressure-tested them on one page before pouring years into them. Two things have saved me…Entrepreneurship3 min
  49. Web Design vs Web Development: The Front-End / Back-End Map"Web design" and "web development" get used interchangeably, and that confusion quietly causes a lot of mis-hires and mis-scoped projects. They're related,…Tech2 min
  50. You Sound Like the Internet AverageThe phrase came out of a script I was writing, and I've been unable to stop thinking about it since.Marketing5 min
  51. Your Champion Is Not Your Budget OwnerAt a client's company celebration, a senior commercial leader — several drinks in, and therefore telling me the truth — said what he actually thought of my…Sales4 min
  52. Swings, Not Hits: Running a Proactive Sales System on a Long CycleYou cannot control whether a customer buys. You have total control over whether you reach out. Every part of the system below follows from that one asymmetry.Sales27 min
  53. How Networks Actually Work: A Practical Map of Computer NetworkingNetworking felt like alphabet soup to me until I had a map — a way to see how the pieces stack. Once the layers clicked, everything from "why is this slow" to…Computer Networks4 min