Notes
Working notes.
Short pieces — observations, fragments, and one-paragraph arguments. Less polished than the articles, more frequent.
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uncomfortable-question
What would you actually take with you?
If you left your web agency tomorrow — your domain? content? ad data? analytics history?
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behind-the-curtain
What we actually use AI for
AI made us faster at building. It did not make anyone faster at thinking.
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behind-the-curtain
The screenshot gallery
Sixty sites from one category, in a single PDF. Eight in ten opened on the same three claims. Positioning got less abstract.
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anecdote
The Post-it note graveyard
Forty ideas. Three outputs. That's not a creativity problem — it's a pipeline problem.
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anecdote
The fire escape
Months of Google Ads targeting 'external steel staircases'. Customers were searching for fire escapes.
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hot-take
The discipline forming in the overlap
Brand specialists writing behavioural specs. Engineers writing prompts about tone. Nobody's hiring for either yet.
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observation
The 'big idea' question
Building used to cost enough that you needed a grand vision. The economics of needing to be right upfront have collapsed.
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myth-buster
The AI website that ranks for nothing
AI handles the build. It does not handle the thinking that makes the build worth doing.
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hot-take
The agency village
Three or four agencies in the room. Every one competent. Every one reporting good numbers. Nothing is improving.
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anecdote
The account that wasn't theirs
Two years of campaigns. Custom audiences. Performance history. All of it stayed with the agency.
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behind-the-curtain
Retain, attract, or earn
Counted our tools. Half had a confident answer for what they're for. The rest got 'it's useful though.'
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observation
Prompt engineers as brand thinkers
The best prompt engineers I've met think like brand strategists who happen to know how to write instructions.
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observation
Late-night competitor scrolling
The instinct to scroll past competitor content fast is expensive — every post is free market research.
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anecdote
Fifteen tools and no product strategy
Each one solved one problem for one client. The roadmap is whatever shows up next Tuesday.
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hot-take
Diagnosis vs treatment
If a tool helps someone understand their problem, it's a lead magnet. If it also fixes the problem, it's charity.
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observation
Creativity does not stop at the idea
Most pipelines treat creativity as the input and squeeze the life out of it during execution.
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framework-slice
What feeds your ad AI?
Every advertiser is using the same algorithm. The website is the only thing they don't share.
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observation
Visual standard up, what's said hasn't moved
The visual standard of marketing is higher than ever. The actual quality of what's being said has barely shifted.
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uncomfortable-question
Useful when it counts
Would your network think of your posts when they hit a real problem?
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observation
Tools that already existed
Asking because the number for us is embarrassingly high.
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behind-the-curtain
Today's glamorous agency work
Building an internal operating system that turns voice memos into blog posts. Still breaks regularly.
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behind-the-curtain
The unsexy truth about homepages
The design gets done. The wireframes get approved. Then everyone waits six weeks for the content.
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uncomfortable-question
The retainer that gets less valuable
When was the last time your retainer felt more valuable over time, not less?
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behind-the-curtain
The reluctant sentence
Adjective lists produced AI fortune cookies. One sentence about internal conflict changed everything.
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observation
The memory of one person
Every small business runs on what someone 'just knows'. We're trying to replace that with infrastructure.
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behind-the-curtain
The custom tool we shouldn't have built
Three weeks of build. Six months later, two formulas in Google Sheets would have done it.
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uncomfortable-question
The approval queue
When was the last time approval took longer than the build?
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signal-boost
Reading competitors instead of writing
An hour reading other people's takes was more productive than any blank-page brainstorm this year.
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behind-the-curtain
LinkedIn as a service
Not SaaS. Not ghostwriting. Something in between, and we're watching the ceiling carefully.
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observation
How many problems are actually in the email?
Sometimes the hardest part of customer support isn't the solving. It's the parsing.
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framework-slice
A funnel wearing a costume
If the assessment only works as a lead-in to a sales call, it's not a tool. It's a funnel wearing a costume.
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framework-slice
The new responsive design
Responsive solved multiple screens. Content is now hitting the same wall with multiple readers.
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myth-buster
Design that's carrying the content
Beautiful work. Considered palette. Then we read the copy with the design covered up.
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myth-buster
Telling them everything is the problem
Most websites tell people about the business. Buyers want to know what to compare.
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hot-take
Building on rented land
Most channels work. Then traffic lands on a website that hasn't been touched since the last redesign.
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observation
What do you actually want to say?
Most marketing conversations start with 'I need a website.' That's almost never the starting point.
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anecdote
Tired of talking about padding
A routine check-in turned into the kind of conversation that made the original brief look like a sticky note.
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observation
What three weeks of development actually buys
AI can produce the same website overnight. So what is the time difference paying for?
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hot-take
The developer who won't return emails
Technical skill is now a commodity. The gap is whether the client feels like they know what's going on.
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anecdote
The cooking class apron
The food was fine. The apron, the pairing, the instructor — that's what I remember.
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anecdote
The accountant who wouldn't stop saying the same thing
She kept repeating one line in every meeting. We turned that into a content pipeline.
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observation
Same site, different experience
Two agencies build the same WordPress site — one calls every day, the other delivers in silence.