Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. The copywriter’s guide to not outsourcing your brain to AI Last week we talked about how AI is stealing our agency, and how the solution is to start using it more like a compass vs a GPS. I was in the middle of a copy refresh for a client we’d just finished a full positioning and messaging overhaul for, and somewhere in that process I caught myself thinking: this is exactly what compass...
11 days ago • 6 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. AI won't steal your job. It'll steal your agency. Here’s something I’ve been feeling lately that I think a lot of you are feeling too. Every morning I open my feed and there’s a new wave. OpenClaws that can run entire marketing campaigns. Vibe coding that lets any 13 year old spin up a SaaS over lunch. Someone even said apps are becoming the new info products (in the scammy sense), which...
18 days ago • 6 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to stop guessing what to say to your ICPs I ran a roundtable yesterday with a group of founders, PMMs, and early-stage marketers. We were talking about messaging and positioning, and within about ten minutes, three different conversations coalesced into the same problem. One person had just raised a big round. Their product had evolved significantly, but messaging hadn’t kept up....
25 days ago • 6 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Your website is becoming a sales conversation Nearly every B2B buyer visits your website before they ever talk to sales. And not just once. They’re there multiple times. Researching, comparing, and forming opinions. By the time they show up to a demo, they already think they know what you do, how you’re different, and whether you’re a fit. The call is just to confirm what they think they...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to frame a problem people can't ignore Last week I talked about how neutral messaging isn't just forgettable—neuroscience shows it literally fails to engage the brain's emotional and attentional systems. And how the right kind of attention comes from combining your unique point of view (what you see that most don't) with strong value messaging (what's specifically in it for them)....
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to grab attention in 2026 What if I told you that to capture attention in 2026, you don’t need a better hook, or to shout from the mountain top? Nope, for your messaging to stand out and convert, now you need to get better at one important skill: understanding what people are thinking, what they want, and how to give it to them in a way nobody does, when they stumble on your...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. The AI-proof way to write copy in 2026 (and beyond) We need to have more bad ideas. I just spent 2 days brainstorming headline variants with AI, and the thing that’s most obvious after hours of sweating over this work is that there’s no real substitute or shortcut for going through the hard mental slog. Which excites me because it says how important human creativity and thinking still...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Do this before you build your GTM ecosystem I stumbled on a newsletter from GTM expert Maja Voje this week (she was on the podcast, a while ago) where she breaks down what she calls the "GTM ecosystem" — and honestly, it's one of the best frameworks I've seen for how fast-growing companies like Clay, Cursor, and Lovable are scaling so aggressively. Her model maps it out in rings: the...
2 months ago • 5 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Welcome to the year of authorship Happy New Year! I haven’t written in a few weeks—partly the holidays, partly because I’ve been sitting with my annual review and planning. One big challenge stood out… The better AI gets, the more I’m questioning my own value. And you should too if you care about your craft. Not in a “robots are coming for your job” way. In a subtler, yet more annoying...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to differentiate when everyone claims the same thing Quick confession: I sometimes have to stop clients mid-sentence in positioning workshops. It’s not that they’re wrong on anything. And even if they were, those are the issues we want to bring up during the workshop. Rather, when working on their positioning, they’re trying to solve the wrong problem. During this collaborative...
3 months ago • 3 min read