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 this week.
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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The Freddy Rumsen Rules: Six Marketing Lessons from the Most Underrated Man at Sterling Cooper
Six Marketing Lessons from the Most Underrated Man at Sterling Cooper – and What They Reveal About Freelancing Then vs. Now
Everybody quotes Don Draper. Nobody quotes Freddy Rumsen. That is a mistake, and if you sell creative work for a living, it is an expensive one.
Freddy is the guy who gets carried out of a restaurant in the second episode of the series. He is the guy who, in Season 3, drinks himself unconscious in his own office and wets his pants the day before a Samsonite meeting, which ends his twenty-year run at Sterling Cooper. He is also the only major character on that show who actually gets sober, stays sober, and comes back. And when the final season opens, it is not Don who delivers the best pitch in the room. It is Freddy – middle-aged, unemployed by the standards of the day, working as a freelancer – walking into his old shop with a line that sells a wristwatch by refusing to talk about time.
Freddy’s arc is a compressed history of the creative services business: staff job, cushioned by expense accounts and tenure, blown up, rebuilt as independent contract work. Which is to say it is the arc that roughly 72.9 million Americans are living right now (MBO Partners, 2025 State of Independence). Here is what he can teach you.
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Buy the Audience Instead of Building One
Every trade vertical is littered with dead assets that still hold real attention. Nobody bids on them, because they are not businesses, so no broker lists them and no banker calls. This is audience acquisition as ordinary M&A, with a much smaller decimal point.
1. The Whole Industry Is Buying Scratch Tickets
Received wisdom says distribution has to be grown. Publish, post, wait, compound. That is a real strategy, and right now it is a losing one for most people who attempt it.
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The Man with Two Coffees
What Bob Benson of Mad Men Still Teaches Us About Marketing – and What the Fake-Credential Economy Looks Like Sixty Years After He Faked His Way Into the Room
In season six of Mad Men, a junior account man named Bob Benson walks the halls of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce carrying two cups of coffee. He drinks one. The second is for whoever he happens to bump into. That is the entire play. And it works so well that an entire viewing public spent a full season convinced he had to be a CIA plant, a corporate spy, or Don Draper’s long-lost brother – because nobody could accept that relentless, weaponized helpfulness was a complete strategy.
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Their Fiscal Year Beats Your Content Calendar
Why your biggest campaign runs in March when your buyer’s money dies in November
Somewhere right now a marketing team is deciding whether the spring campaign launches the second week of March or the third. They will settle it. They will brief the agency, book the media, and ship on a Tuesday because somebody read that Tuesdays perform well. None of it touches the only date that matters, which is the day their buyer’s money stops existing.
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