Florian Decludt's Linkedin Analytics

Seven years ago, 10-year-old made $1,500 in six hours. She didn’t have a CRM. She didn’t have a sales funnel. She didn’t even have a LinkedIn account where she could post self-congratulatory nonsense about “the importance of work-life balance.” All she had was a folding table, a box of cookies, and (brace yourself) common sense. While professional marketers spent millions analyzing buyer personas and running A/B tests on whether "Buy Now" or "Get Yours" converts better, this girl found the simplest truth in the world: Hungry people buy food. So instead of knocking on doors or standing outside a supermarket begging for pity sales, she parked herself outside a weed dispensary. Let me rephrase this. A marijuana shop. A place where the primary side effect of every single product is violent hunger. She wasn’t running a campaign. She was running a monopoly on the world’s easiest upsell. And the result? - 300 boxes. - $1,500. - Six hours. That’s more revenue than some "marketing thought leaders" have made in their entire careers. And yet, somewhere out there, right now, a marketing consultant is still trying to convince a boardroom that the real key to sales is “deepening brand engagement.” No. The key to sales is this: find people who already want what you sell and stand in front of them. If a 10-year-old with a plastic table understands this, what’s your excuse?

AI will make it harder to create great marketing. Not because it’s bad. Actually, when used properly, it’s about as good at ideating and writing as your average mid-level marketer on a Tuesday afternoon after two coffees. No—the problem is that it’s going to make it too easy to create something decent. And since most marketers are human (at least biologically), the temptation to stop at “decent” will be irresistible. Because: 1. Great marketing is risky. The upside is huge, but so is the downside. And since humans are loss-averse by nature, and AI delivers something safe and presentable in seconds, most people will quietly opt for “fine” over “brilliant but scary.” 2. Great marketing takes time. Truly unexpected ideas don’t pop out of prompts. They come from long walks, strange conversations, reading weird stuff, watching people at bus stops. Most marketers don’t have the patience—or the job security—for that kind of thinking. 3. Great marketing is hard to sell internally. Especially now, when AI has made data cheap, ubiquitous, and worshipped. Everyone wants “proof.” But great marketing doesn’t start with proof. It starts with a hunch. A gut feel. A wild, unvalidated idea you woke up with in the shower. And good luck convincing your boss (or your CFO) to greenlight that. So overall? Marketing quality is going to nosedive. Because decent is now just a click away. It’s like supermarket ready-meals. They’re cheap. Fast. Taste okay. And they’ve quietly made millions of people forget what real cooking is. But there’s a silver lining. A handful of weirdos will keep cooking from scratch. They’ll stay curious. They’ll make things that feel wrong at first—but work like magic in the wild. And they’ll be the ones charging $100k retainers while everyone else is stuck reheating lasagna.

The #1 reason customers don't buy? It's not because your product is bad. But because it’s trying to do too much. And as a result no one trusts it doesn't anything well. That's why the most successful products and companies don't start off in life trying to do more. They try to do less. But extremely well.

How three out-of-shape middle-aged men made cars cool (and attracted 350 million fans) Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May are TV presenters like platypuses are mammals: Technically true, but completely ridiculous. Clarkson was a print journalist with strong opinions and no mechanical knowledge. Hammond was almost fired before season one even ended. And May? The charisma of a history teacher reading tax law and the fashion sense of a giraffe sneaking into the Oscars. So how did these misfits create the most-watched car show in history? 5 things: 1) They had no competition Sunday night TV was a national sleeping pill back when they started in 2002: - Period dramas - Documentaries on sheep farming, - And news reminding you Monday morning was near. Then came Top Gear, three buffoons: - Racing planes, - Launching Reliant Robins into space - And setting caravans on fire. And crucially: you didn’t need to like cars to love it. 2) They made cars fun Other car shows droned on about horsepower and suspension geometry. Nobody cares. Top Gear blew up a Toyota Hilux with dynamite, raced Bugattis against fighter jets, and tested supercars in the Arctic. It was a comedy show that just happened to have cars in it. 3) They had opinions (and weren't afraid to start fights over them) TV hosts usually play it safe. Not these three. Clarkson hated Porsches. Hammond mocked Clarkson’s love for overweight supercars. May refused to acknowledge anything flashy or modern. And when they hated a car? They destroyed it. Literally. Top Gear wasn’t about “objective reviews.” It was about grown men bickering like children. 4) They turned chaos into an art form (because predictability is boring) They didn’t just review cars. They: - Drove across Africa in junkyard hatchbacks, - Built homemade space shuttles, - Nearly suffocated in Bolivia. Every episode had brought them to the brink of disaster.. Because they know nobody tuned in for fuel economy stats. They tuned in to see if Clarkson would set himself on fire. Again 5) They didn't try to be cool. Which made them cool Other car shows had slick, robotic presenters in designer suits. Top Gear had: - A guy who looked like a farmhand - A guy literally called "Captain Slow" - A guy who crashed so much he should’ve lost his license 15 years ago They weren’t polished or scripted. They were just three middle-aged men being themselves—and people loved it. And Because of That, They Became a Global Juggernaut: - 350 million fans - More reach than most Hollywood blockbusters - A worldwide franchise that made them TV royalty Until Clarkson punched someone and they all left. Now, What Does This Have to Do With Marketing? Everything. Top Gear didn’t market itself. It became impossible to ignore. Because it was different. Entertaining. Opinionated. Unpredictable. Real. And so they didn't have to “build an audience.” Their audience came to them.

Embrace the quirks of your products. Its shortcomings. Its weirdness. It may well fuel your next marketing hit. Who knows?

Every two days or so, some self-proclaimed marketing visionary declares that cold emailing is dead. They open with a dramatic hook—because hooks are all the rage. Then come the bullet points, listing every supposed flaw of cold outreach, how it's intrusive, ineffective, and as good for lead generation as a drunk hippo is at singing La Traviata. To drive the point home, they pull out the usual suspects: screenshots of tragic cold emails. The kind that begin with "I hope this email finds you well", as if we're still in 2007, when a burnt-out CEO might have booked a meeting out of sheer confusion at such a sentence landing in his inbox. And then—miraculously—they unveil the real answer: content. Build authority before you pitch, they say. Get permission before reaching out. And why do they say that? Because—wouldn’t you know it—they just so happen to have a $499 course that’ll teach you how to “build authority online.” Yes, a magic formula for writing LinkedIn posts that get a few likes and (if the algorithm gods allow) maybe a DM from a stranger asking if you’re actually a human. They vilify cold outreach because they need an enemy. And who better to attack than the big, bad salespeople? The ones trying to hit their quota before their boss feeds them to the wolves? The ones desperately trying to put food on the table and make their kids proud? Of course, some cold emails are trash. Just like some teachers are useless, some mechanics forget to put your oil cap back on, and some basketball players have the coordination of a garden gnome. That doesn’t mean cold outreach doesn’t work. In fact, if this many people are doing it, it definitely works. It’s just that most haven’t figured it out yet. PS: Here’s how to do cold emailing the simple way: - Know exactly who you're targeting. - Find out what pain they have that your solution solves. (The more emotional and concrete, the better.) - Get their emails. - Verify their emails. - Buy an outreach-specific domain. - Warm up the domain. - Send short, problem-focused emails that actually look like they came from a human being rather than a malfunctioning AI bot. - Follow up 4-5 times over ~2 weeks. There’s fancier advice out there, but that’ll get you started. And unlike the “build authority” brigade, I won’t charge you $499 for it.

I'm back.