Marketing and business strategy for companies that are good at what they do and hard to find.
The product works. The clients who find them stay. But there’s no reliable way for the right people to find them in the first place. That’s the problem I solve.
Positioning, competitive analysis, website plans, and search and AI-search visibility. Specific enough to act on Monday.
See work samples → How I work →
Engagements start with a fixed-fee audit from $4,500, through full strategy work and ongoing advisory. The free two-page read is genuinely free – email claude@1000startups.com.
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Peggy Olsen’s Playbook: What a Fictional Copywriter from 1960 Still Gets Right About Marketing in 2026
Seven lessons from Sterling Cooper, stress-tested against linear TV’s collapse, the $32-billion creator economy, and an algorithm that does not care how clever you think you are.
The Secretary Who Outlasted the Medium
Peggy Olson walks into Sterling Cooper in the first episode of Mad Men as Don Draper’s secretary. She walks into McCann-Erickson in the last season with a cigarette in her mouth, sunglasses on, and a piece of pornographic Japanese art tucked under her arm like a briefcase. In between, she does the single hardest thing in this business: she gets good, and then she gets credit.
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Warren Buffett’s Thoughts on Marketing: The Candy Store that Ate Wall Street
A WORKING PAPER ON BRANDS, PRICING POWER AND THE COST OF BEING BELIEVED
THE CANDY STORE THAT ATE WALL STREET
What Warren Buffett Has Actually Said About Marketing – Drawn Entirely From Sixty Years of Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters – And What the Conglomerate Kings of the 1960s Got Catastrophically Wrong
Warren Buffett has written roughly 60 annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. He has never once used the phrase “brand equity.” He has never drawn a funnel, never mentioned a persona, and never, as far as anyone can tell, sat through a positioning workshop.
He also turned $1 into $55,023 while the stock market turned it into $391 – and a startling amount of that gap came from businesses whose entire competitive advantage was that customers liked them. A candy company. A car insurer with a talking lizard. A furniture store in Omaha. If you want to know what marketing is worth, you could read a textbook, or you could read the financial statements of a man who paid cash for it and kept the receipts.
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Eight of the Most Frequent Errors and Oversights in Web Marketing
Everybody Already Knows This. Almost Nobody Checks It.
The 100-Marketer Persona Panel on the most frequent errors and oversights in web marketing – 20 groups, 60 answers, 20 distinct problems, and the outside research that says the panel called it right.
Every company has had this meeting. Somebody proposes a new channel nobody has staffed, somebody else proposes AI creative for it, and not one person in the room can say with confidence whether the contact form still sends email to a human being. That gap – between the clever thing on the slide and the boring thing that broke in March – is the entire subject of this report. Twenty panel groups of five practitioners each were asked for their top three errors in web marketing. They came back with 60 answers that normalized into 20 problems, and they agreed far more than anybody expected. Not one of the top eight is exotic, and all eight are cheap to fix. That is the bad news.
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It’s Toasted: What Don Draper still knows that your AI Stack doesn’t
Six lessons from Mad Men, stress-tested against real effectiveness data – and against the last time a technology made a whole country lose its mind.
The Man Who Never Existed Has Outsold Most People Who Did
Don Draper is a fictional drunk with a stolen name and a worse marriage, and he has probably shaped more marketing careers than any textbook published since 1960. Slightly humiliating for our industry. Also true – Mad Men wrapped in 2015 and the man is still getting quoted in pitch decks eleven years later.
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