I hate to say it, but I think customer service is actually getting better with AI. They respond. They follow up.

08/09 grads are an underrated vintage. The last class that believed in the American dream and the first to graduate college with no job prospects. They have PTSD. They are relentless. I would go long on this group.

Computers being smarter than humans is not a new concept. Spreadsheets have been doing math better than humans since the 70s.

Just chatted with an LA founder who tried to move his startup to SF, but gave up. 4x business costs 3x his personal costs Engineer pay so high that the other engineers on his team would find out and all want raises. Fewer operations people. Not worth it.

Just talked to a group of law firms that now charge clients a fee for sending AI-slop emails they have to read and respond to. New model. Free to generate. Pay-to-consume.

marketing is 100x harder than building

The single trait every successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur has: delusional optimism.

even more unpopular opinion: don't hire a marketer until you have PMF

Boom! We were waiting for this. Here is the AEO search play: > build your business context > create specific marketing and knowledge content to help your customer through the buyer journey > host an AI-optimized section of your website for LLMs to train on We built an agentic tool that does exactly this. gethatter.ai/ai-search-autom…

After being the 2nd person in our office to get stung TO THE FACE on an 8th-floor office balcony, I learned that our neighboring office is BEEKEEPING on their balcony. WTF. Insane.

A law firm client just closed 2 AI search leads in the first month of working with us. Here is what we did. 1/ Put together a list of 100 high-intent AI queries that their ICP would likely search during their buying journey that would return firm recommendations. 2/ Monitored those queries to see where their competitors weren't showing up. 2/ Built a content plan systematically targeting those queries 1-by-1. 3/ Published 3-4 pieces per week of targeted content on their website to rank for the queries. These pieces must be: a/ information-rich (actually useful and accurate) b/ properly structured for LLMs c/ unique to the firm (use the firm's messaging, results, case studies, voice, opinion) That's it! If you are looking for these results from an AI search agency or tool, DM us.

"Our customers are too old to use AI to search." Your customers aren't choosing to use AI for search. Google is choosing for them. Nearly 50% of all Google searches are being answered with AI answers AT THE TOP OF GOOGLE. Your customer is typing in the same thing they typed in Google the same way they have for 20 years. The difference is that what comes back is an AI-generated answer that is summarizing the search results. Thus, every customer is AI searching whether they know it or not. Thus, SEO (search engine optimization) is now AEO (answer engine optimization) for EVERYONE. If your brand isn't showing up in that answer, it's the same as not showing up in Google front page search results. If you want to show up on Google, you need to be doing AEO, not SEO.

SF should be one of the greatest cities in the world; it just can't get out of its own way.

What's actually working in GTM right now; → Founder-led content on LinkedIn or X where the founder genuinely has a point of view and posts 3x a week. Still the highest ROI channel for early stage. → Small, weird communities. Like 200-person Slack groups where buyers hang out. Getting mentioned by a regular member of a 200-person group often converts better than a 50K impression LinkedIn ad. → Outbound that doesn't look like outbound. The cold email era is fading pretty fast. What works now is warm context: engaging someone's content for two weeks before you ever DM them. → Ungated everything. The gated PDF is cooked. Give away the frameworks and sell the implementation. → Dark social proof. Screenshots of happy Slack messages, customer quotes in weird formats, a random tweet from a user saying something nice. Polished case studies ain't hitting as hard these days. What did I miss?

Asked on a podcast: the #1 thing I learned marketing Uber Eats from $0 → $1B? Honest answer: It's not marketing. It's product-market fit. Common knowledge in startups, rare in business advice. Building something people love is the whole game. Everything else is window dressing.

SEO tactics that are now completely irrelevant with Google's shift to AI mode as the default. > Long-form content > Keyword density > Informational keywords AEO tactics that matter now. > Short/dense content > Information density > Commercial keywords > Credibility of opinion (author)

Nobody optimizes their way to happiness. Just do things you enjoy for no reason. Bonus points if your job is one of those things.

50% of adults under 30 live with their parents. Wild. Birth rates are collapsing. We're debating abortion laws. Small point here. Hard to "start a family" when you're sharing a wall with your parents. We may want to look at housing.