Created from a single voice note with Agent Craft
X (Twitter)
Early on, I had a mentor pull me aside after I'd presented a content…
Early on, I had a mentor pull me aside after I'd presented a content plan I was genuinely proud of. He looked at it, looked at me, and said: "You've built something that sounds like every other brand out there. Where are you in this?" I didn't have an answer. Which was the answer. That moment stung. Not because he was wrong, but because I knew he was right the second he said it. I'd spent weeks on that plan and somehow managed to leave myself completely out of it. Clean sentences. Tidy structure. Zero fingerprint. His feedback wasn't dressed up nicely. He didn't soften it. He just said it straight and let it sit there. Nine times out of ten, that kind of feedback is the thing you want to argue with most, and it's also the thing you actually needed to hear most. I wanted to explain myself, justify the choices, point to the research behind it. I didn't. I just listened. Took notes. Sat with the discomfort for a day or two. What changed wasn't the strategy, really. What changed was that I stopped treating my own way of speaking as something to sand down into something more "professional." My grammar, my phrasing, the way I circle back to a point from a different angle, the words I keep reaching for. That stuff isn't noise. That's the signal. It's the fingerprint. The moment I stopped correcting my voice out of my own work was the moment people started actually responding to it. The feedback hurt. I'm glad I didn't deflect it. There's a version of me that walks out of that room and defends the plan, makes a few surface-level tweaks, ships it, and wonders six months later why nothing landed. I've seen other people do exactly that. Smart people. And it doesn't come from arrogance, it comes from not being willing to sit still long enough to let honest feedback do its job. Coachability isn't a soft skill. It's a decision you make in a specific moment, usually an uncomfortable one, to stay in the room and actually take the note. The biggest pitfall isn't getting bad feedback. It's getting good feedback and finding a reason to ignore it.
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- LinkedInI used to think testing marketing assumptions was straightforward. Run an A/B test, look at the numbers, move on. Turns out I was testing the wrong things. The assumption most SMB executives never question is whether their content is actually reaching the right people at all. They obsess over the message, the offer, the copy. Meanwhile, the distribution is quietly broken and nobody's checking. Here's what shifted my thinking. A single 45-second voice note generated 45,000 impressions on LinkedIn. Not a carefully crafted campaign. A voice note. When I saw that, I had to reset my clock on what good content methodology actually looks like. The old testing model assumes effort correlates with results. You pour time into a polished post, you expect reach. But that assumption doesn't hold anymore. The executives who produce thought leading content consistently, even imperfectly, are outperforming the ones who wait until they have something "worthy" to say. So what should you actually be testing? Test the format before the message. A rough voice-recorded insight posted Tuesday morning might outperform a professionally written piece that took three hours. If you haven't compared the two, you don't know. Test the source, not just the copy. Content that sounds like a real person, with a specific point of view and a specific situation behind it, performs differently than brand content. Most companies have never isolated that variable. Test whether your executives are visible at all. If the only person posting is someone in marketing, you're running one experiment when you could be running ten. The methodology failure I see most often isn't bad testing. It's testing inside assumptions that were never examined. Be prepared to pivot when the data tells you the assumption itself was wrong, not just the execution. That's where the real gains are.
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