Podcast 14 min read

Future-Proof Your Marketing Strategy w/ Allan Dib

with Allan Dib

Allan Dib and Chris Do examine why stronger ideas, clear positioning, and useful frameworks outlast marketing tools.

Chris Do

Founder, The Futur™ · August 30, 2025

Faster Marketing Can Still Be Bad Marketing

A business can automate its marketing and still have nothing worth saying. Allan Dib, author of The One Page Marketing Plan and Lean Marketing, sees that confusion as a central risk of AI adoption. His perspective connects the work of explaining marketing through books with the practical experience of running businesses, including a former telecom company.

The attraction is obvious: more assets, less production time, fewer obstacles between an idea and its execution. In conversation with Chris Do, Dib is enthusiastic about those capabilities. What concerns him is the assumption that increased capability automatically produces a stronger strategy.

He points to a familiar social media prescription: ask an AI tool for a batch of quotes, move them into Canva, and consider the month's content finished. The workflow solves a production problem. It does not establish why anyone should pay attention.

Output is not the same as relevance.

Do understands the appeal of these tools from the perspective of a creator working with a small team. Asset production takes time. Exploring ideas takes time. Assistance that reduces those demands creates room for work that would otherwise remain unfinished.

Neither speaker argues for abandoning AI. Their disagreement is with treating the tool as a substitute for decisions that precede production. A faster process can distribute weak thinking more efficiently, but efficiency does not make the thinking stronger.

Dib brings the conversation back to the parts of marketing that remain necessary regardless of the software involved:

Identify a clear target market.
Develop a message that resonates with that audience.
Choose media that can reach those people effectively.
Capture and nurture leads rather than stopping at attention.

These are not glamorous tasks. They are the conditions that make the glamorous tasks useful. A striking image aimed at the wrong audience remains a targeting failure; polished copy without a meaningful proposition remains empty persuasion.

Dib's criticism of AI-generated messaging comes from his own experiments. He describes results that tend toward familiar language and exaggerated claims rather than precise, distinctive communication. That is an assessment of the outputs he has encountered, not proof that every model must produce the same result.

Do adds an important qualification: the tools can extrapolate from supplied information and generate possibilities worth considering. The unresolved responsibility is judgment. Someone still has to decide whether an output is appropriate, compelling, and good.

The problem is not simply excessive content. It is excessive confidence in content that has never been tested against a clear purpose. Producing something and knowing what it accomplishes are different kinds of work.

That distinction sets the stakes for the rest of the discussion. Future-proofing marketing does not mean identifying the tool that will never become obsolete. It means understanding which decisions cannot safely be delegated just because production has become easier.

The Instrument Is Not the Artist

Dib's larger claim is provocative: as execution becomes cheaper and more accessible, good ideas become more valuable. He frames the shift through two questions an investor would ask. Does a market exist for the offering, and can the business actually deliver it?

The first concerns demand. The second concerns execution. AI, in his experience, is reducing some of the difficulty and expense associated with the second question without automatically answering the first.

He offers his own coding activity as an example. Despite not considering himself a coder, he is now doing work in that area with assistance from the tools. The distance between conceiving something and attempting to build it has narrowed.

That does not eliminate execution risk. It changes where some of the difficulty sits. A business still needs something worth delivering, and easier production does not establish that customers want the result.

Dib illustrates the creative implications with an orchestra. A player performs a part; a conductor coordinates the performance; a composer creates the work being performed. His advice to creative professionals is to move toward the role that determines what gets made.

The analogy is intentionally sharp, not a verdict that performers lack individuality. Its practical value lies in separating proficiency with an instrument from authorship of the underlying idea. A tool can expand capability without deciding what deserves to exist.

Do makes the distinction more directly: “It's the artist that makes the paintbrush have value, not the other way around.”

A photographer's camera can automate functions, but the photographer still chooses the subject, the light, and the story. Access to paint and canvas does not guarantee art. Access to an AI interface does not guarantee a compelling creative direction.

This shift from making to directing also sits alongside the broader professional transition named in Moving from Makers to Entrepreneurs. The issue is not abandoning craft. It is deciding which responsibilities remain valuable when more people can access the means of production.

There is a real disagreement over timing. Dib believes businesses have a temporary opportunity to accelerate delivery with AI while largely preserving their existing prices. Do expects that particular advantage to narrow sooner, while remaining confident that the person using the tools still matters.

Neither estimate deserves to become a forecast presented as fact. What their disagreement reveals is more useful: a business built only on being an early tool adopter has a different foundation from one built on taste, ideas, and judgment.

Speed is an advantage, not an identity.

The practical distinction is between producing the same thing faster and knowing which thing should be produced. One improves a workflow. The other gives the workflow a reason to exist.

Attention Requires More Than Availability

The creative opportunity does not erase the ethical objection. Do raises a concern familiar to artists: whether training data includes intellectual property used without permission, and whether using the resulting tools contributes to harm against other creators.

Dib does not dismiss the concern. He describes fighting unauthorized copies of his own work, including pirated books and material uploaded elsewhere. Someone on his team spends part of their working time sending takedown requests.

His response shifts from permission to commercial survival: being unknown can be a larger business problem than being copied. That is his prioritization as a business owner, not a resolution of the intellectual property question. The two issues should not be confused.

A creator can defend ownership and still need a strategy for being discovered. Refusing to publish does not make a business easier to find. Nor does doing excellent work guarantee that enough of the right people will encounter it.

Dib's hiring story makes the visibility problem concrete. While other applicants submitted conventional resumes, one candidate sent him a personalized video through a direct message. She explained why she believed she fit the role and demonstrated familiarity with his work.

The video did not prove that she deserved the job. It earned consideration. Dib carefully separates those outcomes: her suitability remained undecided, but she had secured his attention.

That difference matters. Standing out is not the same as qualifying, and visibility is not the same as trust. It creates the opportunity for a more substantive evaluation to happen.

The candidate's approach also challenges the assumption that differentiation requires something elaborate. Dib's other examples are ordinary gestures made specific:

A personalized video that shows familiarity with the recipient.
A handwritten note referencing a real conversation.
A useful physical book sent to a carefully chosen audience.

Do describes the attraction of a thoughtful note as a combination of slowness and physical presence. Someone took time to remember particulars, write them down, and send something tangible. The gesture communicates attention before the recipient finishes reading.

Dib approaches physical mail as a potentially underpriced channel. In one campaign, he recalls paying roughly $15 or $16 to acquire a lead requesting a free book, before accounting for the book and postage. That prompted a different question: would sending books directly to a targeted list cost less?

His account is a campaign anecdote, not a universal case for direct mail. The useful principle is comparative: a crowded channel should not become the default simply because it is digital.

The same caution applies to social platforms. A channel is a place to build a relationship, not evidence that one already exists, a distinction reflected in the related title Demystifying LinkedIn. The strongest gesture is not necessarily the newest. It is the one that makes genuine attention visible.

Marketing That Pays Before the Purchase

For Dib, useful marketing should benefit people who never become customers. He explains the idea through a scene at home: sitting on his balcony with green tea, enjoying the garden maintained by a neighbor. The neighbor bears the expense and does the work; Dib receives some of the pleasure.

He uses the economic concept of positive externalities to describe that benefit. Applied to marketing, the principle is straightforward. A business can create material that helps people beyond the group who eventually pay for its services.

This is a different proposition from an advertisement that exists only to interrupt. An educational conversation, a useful email, or a book can have value independent of the transaction it eventually supports. The marketing does something before it asks for something.

Dib connects this approach to Lean Marketing, where he advocates giving away the best material rather than protecting every useful insight behind a purchase. His commercial logic depends on a distinction between knowing what to do and wanting help doing it.

Some people will use the information independently. Others will want assistance implementing it. Still others will want a deeper relationship with the person or organization whose thinking has already proved useful.

The free material is not a defective version of the paid offer. It performs a different job.

This puts an obligation on the quality of the education. Content cannot establish confidence in implementation if the content itself is vague, self-congratulatory, or impossible to apply. A promise of expertise is weaker than an experience of it.

Do tests the idea against the conversation itself. The audience can consume it without paying, learn from it, and decide whether to investigate either speaker further. The commercial possibility follows the value rather than replacing it.

The tension is also present in the title Free Work That Actually Pays: free and commercially useful are not necessarily opposites. In Dib's argument, the relevant distinction is whether the free work creates a meaningful benefit and a credible basis for further engagement.

He is equally critical of content that treats attention as something to seize through noise. Loudness and interruption can attract notice without giving anyone a reason to stay. A person watching an ad is not automatically a person developing confidence in the advertiser.

That makes content quality a commercial decision, not simply an editorial preference. Material that helps someone solve a problem demonstrates how the business thinks. Material that merely occupies a slot in a publishing calendar demonstrates that the business can publish.

The garden analogy provides a useful test without requiring a metric or a funnel diagram. If no purchase follows, has the audience still gained something? For Dib, that benefit is not wasted effort. It is part of what the marketing is supposed to accomplish.

The Middle Is Not a Position

Differentiation becomes harder when a business chooses its price by averaging the competition. Dib describes the familiar calculation: one provider charges a lot, another charges little, so a new entrant settles somewhere between them. The number feels defensible because it appears moderate.

It can also leave the business without a clear reason to be chosen.

Dib borrows the image of the barbell strategy associated with Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe an alternative. In this conversation, the useful application is positioning at distinct ends of a market rather than assuming the center is safest. This is Dib's business analogy, not an investment recommendation.

At one end sits a low-price offer supported by volume or a real cost advantage. At the other sits a premium proposition with a substantially different experience. Do recognizes the pattern as an inverted bell curve.

Dib's former telecom business gives the low-price side some substance. He says technology available to his company allowed it to deliver service at a lower cost, and that advantage helped it serve a particular underserved market. The price followed an operating advantage rather than wishful thinking.

That distinction is essential. Charging less without a cost advantage is not the same strategy. It changes the revenue without necessarily changing what delivery demands.

The premium side also needs more than a larger number. Do describes a provider charging substantially more and delivering an experience that makes customers grateful for the choice. The positioning must be expressed in what the client actually receives.

The related episode 99% Of Creatives Lose Money With These Pricing Mistakes offers another entry into the pricing subject. Here, the central concern is specifically the connection between price and a recognizable market position.

Dib's examples move beyond the usual luxury categories. He describes searching for a metal container for vitamins and finding a hand-machined option priced around $200, far above a basic plastic alternative. Do adds a more carefully designed power strip whose material, color, and braided cable make an otherwise ordinary object appealing.

Neither example proves that every category supports a premium business. Both show what a purely functional comparison leaves out: materials, aesthetics, production methods, and the pleasure of ownership.

Dib adds story to that equation. The explanation of how something is made and why it exists can help communicate what a bare specification cannot. Story supports the difference; it does not manufacture one out of nothing.

He applies similar reasoning to service tiers, arguing that small price gaps can obscure meaningful distinctions between offers. His preference is for larger gaps that reflect different buyers and different propositions. The lesson is not that the middle always fails, but that moderation alone is not a compelling position.

The Method Is Part of the Product

The conversation's strongest response to commoditization arrives in its final movement. Dib identifies three assets that can help a business become harder to substitute: intellectual property, proprietary data, and distribution. When Do asks which deserves priority for someone choosing only one, Dib selects frameworks.

His explanation is concise: “Frameworks teach people how to think.”

The value is not merely that a framework has a name. It gives people a usable way to approach a problem. Information becomes more valuable when someone can understand where to begin, what follows, and how the pieces relate.

Dib sees his own book as an example. He argues that the same material under a generic marketing title would not have had the same impact. The organizing framework helps readers do something with the ideas rather than simply admire them.

He contrasts that experience with reading marketing books full of clever insights and finishing without knowing what action to take. His criticism is not that an insight has no value. It is that insight and application are separate problems, and a reader often needs help crossing the gap.

The three assets have different roles in his argument:

Intellectual property and frameworks: A codified approach makes expertise understandable and teachable.
Proprietary data: Information about an industry or buying behavior can provide distinctive insight.
Distribution: An audience or community creates a way for that thinking to reach people.

These assets can reinforce one another. A useful method creates something to teach, teaching can become content, and content can help an audience understand the work. Dib's recommendation begins with the method because it gives the other activity substance.

For service businesses, codification also has an operational purpose. A process held entirely in one practitioner's head is difficult to transfer. Making it explicit can help turn an individually performed service into something more consistently deliverable.

Dib calls this productizing the service. The aim is not necessarily to make every result identical. It is to make the underlying approach visible enough that delivery does not depend on unexplained intuition at every step.

That changes the meaning of scale. Rather than simply asking one person to work faster, the business has a method that other people can understand and use. The framework becomes part of how the work is produced, not just how it is marketed.

Do gives the idea a necessary boundary: a framework is only useful if other people can apply it. Complexity is not evidence of sophistication. An elaborate diagram that fails to guide action has not solved the problem Dib is describing.

The standard is transfer, not decoration. Someone other than the creator needs to be able to follow the thinking and put it to work.

Make the Thinking Visible

A framework does not have to begin with a blank page and an invented acronym. Dib suggests observing work that already happens. A practitioner often follows recurring patterns without having named them, simply because experience has made the sequence feel natural.

Someone watching could notice the order: a sketch begins in a particular way, colors follow, and another operation comes next. The practitioner experiences one continuous act. The observer can identify decisions and stages within it.

This is where tacit expertise becomes explainable. The task is not to create a performance of expertise for the market. It is to reveal the structure already helping the practitioner produce results.

Dib's writing process supplies a concrete example. He says he does not begin by staring at a blinking cursor. He collects material before drafting and develops an outline or an idea of what the piece needs to become.

He keeps notes on useful ideas and separate snippets of language that strike him as effective. Those fragments are not necessarily copied into the final work. They give him material to consider when developing an argument or improving a sentence.

The sequence he describes can be made visible without inventing a new method:

Start with an idea or outline.
Collect relevant ideas and useful language in notes.
Fill in the structure and connect the material.
Refine the wording with more precise or expressive choices.

The sequence does not write the piece for him. It reduces the dependence on a moment of inspiration and separates different kinds of decisions. Finding the argument and improving its expression do not have to happen simultaneously.

Do distinguishes this kind of framework from a recipe. A recipe points toward one specific result. A framework provides an underlying structure that can support different results while keeping the process intelligible.

That distinction also resolves a tension running through the conversation. Dib argues for originality while recommending repeatable methods. Those ideas are compatible when the structure supports creative judgment rather than pretending to replace it.

The same applies to AI. A tool can help execute parts of a process, but a visible method clarifies where decisions belong and what the output needs to accomplish. Automation becomes more purposeful when the work it supports has already been understood.

The practical challenge is therefore unusually concrete. Can the business explain how its expertise becomes a result? Can another person understand the approach, apply it, and recognize why it differs from an interchangeable alternative?

A faster workflow cannot answer those questions on its own. Neither can a premium price, a larger content calendar, or a more elaborate brand story. Each becomes more credible when there is a clear method underneath it.

The next tool can make the work faster. It cannot be the reason the work matters.

TRANSCRIPT

Alan Dibb is the author of the One Page Marketing Plan, a global bestseller that's helped thousands of entrepreneurs cut through the noise and actually get results. In this episode, we break down what makes marketing work, why most businesses get it wrong, and how to simplify your strategy without sacrificing impact. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by marketing advice, this one's for you. My name's Alan Dibb, and you're listening to The Future. I told a friend of mine that I'm going to have Alan Dib back on and she was so excited. She goes, I'm just trying to contain myself right now because I want you to say hi for me, but he doesn't even know who I am. I think there's some excitement from our audience, from our community. So I just want to welcome you back, Alan. Good to see you again, my friend. So good to be back and so good to see you again, Chris. What do we have for the agenda? What are we going to talk about today? Well, you know, you might call this the wedding episode. I've got something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. So, uh, Okay. I like that. So I'm pretty sure it's not going to be about weddings, everybody. So hang, hang in there. Let's peel back the layers. So, okay. So what is, do we, do we start with something old? Let's start with something old. So one of the things that I'm seeing a real resurgence on is back to fundamentals, because I think people are overwhelmed. And I don't know if you see this in your community and with some of the people that you're working with day to day, but every single day there's this new AI tool, this new image tool, this new large language model, this new chat GPT function or whatever. And you know, I see the spectrum from people completely freaking out, like, Hey, the world's going to go to shit and we're going to all lose our jobs and all of this. And people are like, wow, I'm like a kid in a candy shop. So I'd love to hear your, your view and what you're seeing from your community as well. I think exactly the sentiment you just shared with us. I'm personally very excited about the advances in AI because as a person who creates but needs help with a very small team that we have in place to be able to create assets or do things that are very time consuming or to potentially explore new ideas, I think AI is super empowering. And the price point, I mean, I just want people to think about this. If they charge people $2,500 a month to use this, people would still sign up. But they're charging like $25 a month. and they can charge whatever they want, but this is the price they're charging right now. So it's pretty incredible. This was 2000 a month. I think it would be an amazing deal. Like, so the tools are super amazing, but one of the things that my view is, is people get faked out by tools. People are like, wow, this can do all of my marketing. This can do all of my sales. And no doubt you've seen some of those ridiculous TikToks or reels where people are like, Hey, go into chat GPT, tell it your niche, tell it to generate a hundred quotes and upload it to Canva and your social media for the month is done. And it's kind of like people are feeling like this is going to do it all for you. That this is just a magic tool that's going to take over your social media. It's going to do all of your stuff for you. But really that's kind of like the instantification of your social feed, right? You see all of these crappy, you know, AI slop, you know, and no one's going to engage with that. No one's going to care about that. No one's going to be, wow, he uploaded a bunch of quotes to Canva and I'm going to like them or interact with them in any way. So a lot of it comes back to timeless fundamentals and timeless fundamentals to me are really answering that Jeff Bezos question, what's not going to change. So there's a lot that's going to change some of these AI tools, some of the ways that we do it, the things that really give us an amazing amount of leverage, but some of the things that are not going to change being super clear about your target market, having a message that really resonates with your audience that really cuts through the noise, picking media that's going to reach your audience in an effective manner, capturing leads, nurturing leads, all of those sorts of things. Yeah. Some of the tools are going to absolutely accelerate what we do and they're going to help us. And I kind of think of it like the Iron Man suit. Have you seen Iron Man movies where you've got a geeky looking guy, kind of like me, Tony Stark, and he puts on this Iron Man suit and suddenly he's got amazing powers. He's got powers to fly, to do all of this sort of stuff. And and I think of AI tools in a similar way. They're the Iron Man suit. They enable us to do superhuman things, but they don't replace us. You still, you still need the creativity. You still need the ideas. You still need the things that are, that are going to actually make the, the thing, the thing, right? So I've tried. I've tried, I don't know about you. Like I spent a lot of time with AI tools and I have tried every prompt and I've tried every single way to get it, to come up with a novel idea. Like, and I, I failed, I haven't been able to get it to come up with a something that's truly original. And that's really by design of the tool. The tool is designed to give you the median or, you know, kind of the average response, the cliched response. And that's, that's the design of the tool. I also find it to be quite good. If you give it some information to say, extrapolate what the next version of this might look like, it's pretty good at its logic and projecting things forward. I haven't run enough tests, but I, I do enjoy seeing what it will come up with. It's like, oh, okay. But I think at the end of the day, there needs to be human, someone with taste who understands creativity to judge and to arbitrate whether or not this is good. Because it can make lots of things, but if you can't discern whether it's good or not, that's problematic. Totally. And it's not great at deep domain knowledge. Like it's great at averaging, at getting the midpoint at, you know, kind of, you know, it's got this flattening effect. It's where like the, the opinions and ideas and output that it comes up with is kind of And it's designed that way. It's designed to statistically give you the next most probable response. So if you type in the sky is, most likely it'll come up with blue as the next kind of word. And so that's really by design. So when it comes to what we're doing as marketers, what we're doing in terms of getting our message out and getting it to more people. So a lot of it will come down to having a very, very clear idea of who our target market is, what our message is, how our message is really going to cut through to our target market. I found it particularly average at messaging. So a lot of times it'll have very high P or very, you know, kind of, you know, and again, because it is hard to come up with really solid messaging that absolutely cuts through. Most messaging is pretty mid, pretty average, gets lost in the noise. And so it is a challenge to do really good messaging. So the thing that I'm really, really excited about for creative people is they've kind of got a monopoly on the most valuable part of marketing of writing of you know creating things which is creativity you know if you think about you know and that kind of gets into kind of what's new you know there was this there's for a long time there's this been idea that you know idea ideas are you know useless you know it's all about the execution right And if you think about it from an investor's point of view, and I always like to think about both my own business and my clients' businesses from an investor's point of view. So what's an investor going to look at? They're going to usually look at what's the execution risk and what's the market risk. They're going to be like, All right, well, tell me about the market for that product or service that you're, you know, is there actual demand? Do people want this? Will people pay for it? Is there a high lifetime value? All of those sorts of things. And then they're going to look at execution risk, which is, hey, can you actually do this thing? Can you actually deliver this thing and actually get it done? And now the execution risk has dropped dramatically, right? So what's left now is, and you know, that's going to be amplified more and more is that the value is in the idea. I mean, I'm not a coder by any stretch. I used to maybe a couple of decades, do a little bit of code and things like that, but never was a coder by any stretch. I'm doing coding now. Right? And so the execution risk and the execution has become a lot less lower cost and a lot less lower risk. So if you've got clever ideas, if you're a creative person, if you can come up with ideas that are unique, valuable, there's massive, massive leverage in that. To the choir here is where there's a lot of creative people. And they're like, please tell us more because they feel very much threatened by this. There's this whole anti AI thing that's going on right now. And so, and I've heard other people say this, especially people in marketing, they say creativity is going to be the key differentiator in this space because the machine can come up with lots of things, but it may not come up with the most creative idea. So how else do we pull back the layer of the onion on this? So here's how I've been thinking about it. It used to be that, you know, you'd, you know, you think of an orchestra, you'd be the player in the orchestra. And then if you got really good, maybe you're the violinist or whatever. So if you get really good, you're first violinist. And then if you progress up in your career, whatever, you might become the conductor of the orchestra. But all of those are very much replaceable parts in the system. You know, let's say first violinist gets sick, someone else will take his place. If the conductor gets sick or whatever, they'll find another conductor or whatever. But the one person who is irreplaceable is the composer, right? We can't replace Beethoven. We can't replace Mozart. We can't replace them, right? So if we're having a Mozart concert, we need Mozart, right? So we need the person who is the composer. So we want to go from player and first violinist and conductor to composer. So composer is going to be the one who brings the most value. So you as a creative person being able to do the composition and bring that to the marketplace. And I want to talk about identity in just a moment, but remind me on that, but we'll come back to that. But what are your thoughts in terms of what are the biggest objections you're hearing from creative people? What are some of the fears? Objection number one probably is what data set was used to train this machine? This is intellectual property theft. And if I do, if I use these tools, then aren't I participating in that as well? So it's like artists harming other artists. That's, I think that's a big part of it. What do you think about that? I actually agree with that. I know my material, you know, is I've literally got someone whose part-time job in my team is sending DMCA takedowns, people who are ripping off our stuff, who are putting it up on YouTube, who are pirating it. I constantly have to fight Amazon to remove pirated versions of the book and things like that. So I hate that. But what I will say is obscurity is a much bigger problem than theft. So someone not knowing who I am is a much, much bigger problem than someone ripping off my stuff. So I hate people ripping off my stuff and I don't like it and I act against it. But obscurity is a much, much bigger problem. Okay. That's very logical. What are your thoughts? I agree with you that if you sit It's like saying, I'm going to be really good at what I do. And I don't want to play the game of social media. I want to make content. This is happening before AI. And if the work is good enough, you don't have to sell. So they're going to deliberately choose to live in a state of obscurity, I think, to be known by a very small group of people. And that's it. And that's the kind of old school mindset around that. Yeah. Well, to me, I would rather have a problem of people ripping off my stuff than, than nobody knowing who I am being the starving artist. You know, I came from nothing and you know, I'm not saying it's the worst thing in the world, but you know, being, being rich and, and you know, people knowing about me, people, you know, having some notoriety and things like that is much better. Trust me. It is. Without a doubt. We've both been poor and it's better to be rich than poor. You have different problems. Yes. But you have problems you can solve. Totally. Totally. And by the way, I mean, money only solves money problems. So you've got to get your other shit together as well. And you've got to get your life together and find other ways. So I'm not saying that that's the only thing for without a shadow of a doubt. So, so to me, I, the other quote, I remember, I'm probably going to butcher it. It's like, if you, if you have a good idea, your biggest problem is not going to be people stealing it. It's going to be you trying to ram it down their throat. You know, you, you're going to have to try and really, really, really hard to, to get that idea out to people. And it's just a, like I said, I often, I mean, in the, in my second book, Lean Marketing, I talk about this. I say, give your best stuff for free, you know, because and give 99% of your best stuff for free. The people who will buy from you are the people who want help implementing the people who believe in you, believe in what you're doing. Give away 99% of your stuff, give away your very, very best stuff. Don't be afraid. Like just have that abundance mindset and have, have your stuff out there because I know now, like our team is growing now we're at a team of about 20 people. And so we get now people applying for the jobs and, you know, uh, You notice the people who stand out from the crowd, like there'll be people who just submit their resume or whatever, they all look the same or whatever, you filter them through and they tell you that they went to a good school and all of that sort of stuff, all the stuff that doesn't matter. And then there'll be the few that kind of stand out. Like yesterday I had someone slide into my DMs and send me a personalized video saying, hey, I'd be a perfect candidate for the job, you know, and she outlined, you know, how she's been following us, all of that sort of stuff. One out of 10,000 people will do that. Now, I don't know if she's going to be a perfect fit or not, maybe not, but she has my attention, right? And she's a patent interrupt and she's done something that, you know, the thousand other candidates haven't done. So to be a patent interrupt, to be the different in the sea of sameness, It's not that hard. It's not the, the bar is really, really low. And now with all of this AI slop with all of this automated generated content, and you'll see people commenting on LinkedIn that are obviously bots and you know, all of this crap, it is so easy to stand out. And so you've got, you've got the ability to stand out just by being authentic, sometimes going analog, like you wouldn't believe how easy it is to stand out, like sending someone a handwritten note. How much does that cost? How much does it cost to send a postcard with a handwritten note on it saying thank you or hey, it was a pleasure speaking to you the other day. I'm really looking forward to working with your team. What is it? $2 for a stamp and a envelope or whatever it is. And so being able to stand out in a creative way, being that patent interrupt is a massive, massive leverage point and very, very few people do it. I think somebody had said this and you and I are going to be famous for messing up quotes perhaps is, is something like analog is the new luxury and going slow is the new luxury being able to take your time. Yeah. So you take two of those principles, slowing down, writing a thoughtful handwritten note that pulls on some specific things. So it's not just a generic thing. And sending an analog receipt of that in the form of a postcard or a note or something like that is the new luxury. So you're saying to somebody, you're really important. Your relationship, our connection is important to me. Totally. And you know, as a marketer, I'm looking for underpriced assets. So I'm looking for underpriced opportunities. So we ran a campaign where we were giving away free copies of the one page marketing plan on Facebook. And you know, it would, it was an ad where, Hey, I can't remember the copy of the ad or whatever, but long story short, it would cost us like about 15 or $16 to get someone to get a lead that we would send a book to. And I'm like, the book costs us like $3 or $2 to print or whatever. And I don't know, it'd cost us another few bucks to post. We could just post it to a list of highly targeted people and it'd cost us less than getting the click and the opt-in. So I'm looking for underpriced assets. So when you're looking at people's physical mailboxes, whether it be packages, whether it be postal mail or whatever, they're there's massive, they're empty, right? Their digital inboxes, their DMs, all of that, they're overflowing. People, you know, I don't have the, I couldn't tell you how many unread emails I have in my email inbox. I've got DMs all day long and, you know, I'll get to some of them sometime, but someone sends me a package that's got a 99.9% open rate. The point I'm making here is that But your marketing, it used to be stuff that we interrupt. It's the kind of the spam, the pollution. It's kind of like the thing we had to do because, you know, we needed to get in front of an audience. It was kind of, but now the marketing is the thing that adds a lot of value. And then a portion of the people who get your value. or by the thing that you do. And I think that's such a much better way of doing it. It's kind of, we're creating positive externalities. It's kind of like, I sort of relay this in one of my books, but I've got a balcony at the back of my house and it overlooks one of my neighbors. She, and they've got a beautiful garden. You know, they spend hours and hours in the garden. I couldn't imagine how much they spent on this garden. You know, I sit there on the balcony, I have my green tea and I look over the garden and I enjoy their water feature and all of that. And it didn't cost me anything. They bore all of the cost, but it created a positive externality. right? So economists often talk about externalities. Externalities are usually negative. It's like, you know, the pollution from a factory, you know, poisoning the neighborhood or whatever, but this is a positive externality. And that's exactly what we want to do from a marketing perspective. We want to create that positive externality where even if the vast majority of people see our stuff don't buy, they still get a positive effect from what we're doing. So that's one of the core principles of lean marketing is that we're going to create positive externalities with our marketing. How do we do that? What is the real life example of a marketing being that creates that positive externality. Well, I think a good example is what you and I are doing right now. Like, you know, someone listening to the future or someone reading my book or someone being on my email list, getting, getting our emails, like 99% of the stuff there is designed to just help you and get you a good result. Whether you ever buy from or not. And I mean, if we look at all the people who've ever listened to some of your stuff or, or, you know, watched your YouTube channel or whatever. probably 99% of them will never ever give you a single dollar, but they've received a lot of value, but there'll be a small percentage where they say, Hey, you know, I want, I want to, I want to further my relationship with Chris. I want to join his community. I want to join one of his programs or whatever else. And that's enough because the internet is just got so much volume where we don't need, you know, you know, a large proportion of the people who are watching our content or seeing our stuff to buy. We only need a tiny, tiny percentage, you know, 99.9% of the world has no idea who Alan Dib is or who Chris Doe is. And yet we can run multi multi-million dollar businesses off that 0.001% who know us, like us and trust us. So what you're describing here, maybe a traditional marketer might not look as marketing. So we're creating content right now that's free to consume. That if in theory we're doing it right, is educational, it's informative, and hopefully it's entertaining. And maybe we're telling some stories, we're being relatable, and then it's up to the audience to listen to this. And some of them might raise their hand and say, "Hey, I'm kind of interested in going deeper with one of you or both of you." And then they'll take it upon themselves to look us up and go down the rabbit hole. Is that the example we're talking about right now? Yeah, that's what we're talking about. But also, and I got this phrase from my friend Taki Moore, he talked, he talked about brand width. So what he found was if someone had consumed 47 minutes or more of his content, they were far, far, far more likely to buy like, like orders of magnitude. It was like, no. So For him, one of the biggest leverage points was, all right, well, how do we get people to consume more of my content? And his content is genuinely helpful, really, really strong. It'll actually help you get a result in advance. And so if you've spent 47 minutes with his content and you're like, wow, this is awesome. I've actually, I've implemented, I got a result. Well, imagine what would happen if I paid him and joined his program or whatever. And, you know, and that sort of thing versus, oh, A lot of what we're seeing is like all of these crazy interruption things, you know, you, you scroll either on Instagram or Tik TOK or whatever, and there's these annoying interruption ads and they're self-focused and they're, they're either boring or they're loud or whatever. They're not adding value. They're noise. They're adding that they're creating a negative externality. They're the pollution from the smoke stack of the factory. So they're not creating that positive externalities. So I think that there's going to be a massive shift and just, you know, this announcement from Meta that, Hey, We don't want you selecting targeting manually because we know you're going to just do spammy ads and things like that. And they want for them, they want more time on platform. They want more eyes. And what they find is, you know, organic content that works well is going to be ad content that works well. Right. So people don't read or hear or watch, you know, ads people hear or watch or read the things that they enjoy. And sometimes that's an ad, right? We've covered something new. Now I want to cover something borrowed. Nassim Taleb has these, this idea of the barbell strategy. I don't know if you've heard that before, but it's where you avoid the middle ground. You take an extreme position, kind of, if you think of a literal barbell, you know, there's two extremes and then not much in the middle. And so Um, this applies, he mainly applies it to the world of finance and investing where, you know, 90% you would have in safe assets, maybe mutual funds or index funds or whatever. And then five or 10%, you have in speculative things you might do. I don't know, Bitcoin or some, some investment that's. Highly unlikely to pay off, but if it pays off, it's just going to be a huge payoff or whatever else. So that's his essentially his investment philosophy so that, you know, You might win big maybe, but chances are you won't. And then your 90% is just growing at whatever, seven or 8% or whatever. So I've found that the barbell strategy really applies to almost all areas of life, but particularly in business, particularly in marketing. So what I've found is you want to avoid the middle. So many people are like, Hey, what should I price my service or product And they're looking at, all right, well, this guy's really high. This guy's really low. I'll go into the middle. And the middle is absolutely the worst place to be. The people that I've found who do really, really super well, either price really low and work on volume, and maybe they've got some kind of cost advantage. That was part of our strategy. When I had, I used to have a telecom business. Part of our strategy was we had a special cost advantage because we had some technology that it others didn't or very few people had. And so we were able to offer, you know, deliver a service at a much lower cost. So we had a special cost advantage. And so we use part of that to target a specific target market that was underserved. And so we really did well out of that. So for the most part, most people will probably not have a super cost advantage that other people don't have access to. So the other end of the extreme is pricing really, really high. Right. So avoiding that middle. And I know you talk about pricing a lot, so I'd love, I'd love to know your, your thoughts on that, avoiding the middle and really being at the barbell, you know, the barbell strategy. Very interesting. You refer to it as the barbell strategy, how I've heard it described before is the inverted bell curve. So we see the bell and the inverted bell curve. And what's happening is we see this in, in a lot of industries and pricing strategies is If you're the bargain place, you could do well. And if you're the premium place, you could do well. It's all the ones in the middle that get slaughtered because people prefer either it to be cheaper or to have a more luxurious experience. And the example would be, I think companies like Target, Costco, to degree, Zara, and those other kind of discount places do really well. And they have a lot of business. One of, I guess the big one would be Walmart. Walmart sells high volume products. low price and they're a huge corporation, right? And then we look at the super high end stuff, the luxury brands like the Louis Vuittons, the LVMH brands, those kinds of things. And maybe they're struggling a little bit now, but generally speaking, they do really well. And if we take it to a smaller business, so small to medium sized business, And we're thinking, where do we price ourselves? Well, the middle gets lost in the noise and it's hard to differentiate. You can't say we're the only that does this because there's a whole lot of people in there that do that too. So if you say we're the most premium shop and you're going to pay three times as much to work with us and thank us for the experience, like, okay, that's the position. I'd like to be in that position, by the way. Or you can say, you know what, we'll get this thing done for 99 bucks. whatever you want and you just give as much as you want to do it. And I think there, there's a lot of validity to that. That's backed up by real business and economic studies. Yeah, I totally agree. And you'll find that the, the clients that pay you the most, uh, the ones that are just the easiest dream clients to work with. You know, I found that in my telecom business, we used to have, we used to service B2B And, you know, a small customer for us would spend maybe two or $300 a month and we would get constant calls. We'd have to chase payment and we'd have complaints. The clients who paid us $10,000 a month, we never heard from them other than, you know, they automatically paid their bill on time. We never heard a thing. Once a year we'd have a conversation and renew and that was really it. And I've found that to be true across every single business without exception. The clients who pay the most are the easiest, most fun people to work with. Love what you do. They'll refer you to new people. The painful clients are the ones who pay you the least. They want the most and the most difficult by far. So, so definitely the barbell strategy applies from a pricing perspective. That's been my view. And. The way I've seen that play out as well is people often don't have enough of a pricing gap between the different plans they have. So for example, I was talking to a client the other day, they've got, they said, oh, I've got a thousand dollars a month plan and I've got a $2,000 a month plan and and Really to the right customer, $1,000 a month and $2,000 a month is the same thing. There's no difference. So I usually want at least a three to 10 X gap. So I think you should have $1,000 a month plan, a $10,000 a month plan. And like, you'll see that often with SaaS companies, SaaS companies test this. you know, to the nth degree. So they'll usually have a free plan. They'll have a $20 plan. They'll have a $200 plan, and then they'll have an enterprise plan where, Hey, you've got to speak to the sales team. So looking at your, because if you have a big enough price gap, you now have completely different positioning. So the guy who's paying $10,000 a month is radically different to the guy who's paying a thousand dollars a month. There's no So, and, and I think that's, that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. You know, it's just, it's just hilarious to see what can be positioned as a luxury brand. Like there's hand soap, you know, Aesop. Hand soap is a luxury brand. I was looking at, you know, I travel a lot and looking just online for a thing to hold my vitamins and things that I take supplements that I take each day. I'm trying to get rid of plastic from my life. So I was looking, I'm like, is there any, are there any metal ones that, you know, that I can put pills in or whatever? And there's ones that I couldn't find any other than this one place that hand machines them. And they're like $200. Like you normally, these things are like a dollar 50 from Amazon. They're made of plastic and these guys make them for $200 hand machining them or whatever. And I'm like, This is incredible. Like the kind of things that can be luxury goods that are not really, you know, things that you think of luxury. I mean, people think of clothes or cars or things as potential luxury goods and they can be, but just the average items that can be positioned as luxury goods or high end goods is just incredible to me. When you've got a job to do, Lowe's knows how to help you keep it moving. My Lowe's Pro Rewards members save more with member volume discounts on eligible orders through a quote of $2,000 or more. Plus, save time with job site delivery on select purchases. Not a member? Join for free today. Exclusions, more terms, and restrictions apply. Can't be combined with any other discount, including but not limited to contract and or special pricing. Loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. Details at lowes.com slash terms. Subject to change. Yeah, that brings us back to the thing that we talked about earlier, which is slow is the new luxury. To hand or machine, to mill out an aluminum block, to engineer that, to put it together, and it's heavier and it's way more time consuming than injection molding out a thousand pieces at a time. For someone who cares about that kind of stuff like you, you'd pay more. So here's something ridiculous. Extension cord with a multi-outlet socket thing. You can buy a cheap one from Belkin or one of these other companies for a few bucks on Amazon, or you can buy one with the braided power line that's fabricated from not an extruded piece of metal, but it's metal and it's industrial orange and it's only got four plugs and you'll pay 60 or $80 for that. It's like they both do the same job, but one has something the other doesn't have, which is an aesthetic appeal. when you look at it, it makes you smile. I hundred percent agree with that. There's the aesthetic appeal, but also a lot of times a story attached to it. If you can attach a powerful story, even better, like that's gonna, you know, story is such a powerful device for for selling, for moving people to action, for getting people to feel something, for getting people to do what you want to do. And again, I think a recurring theme is words. We're programming moist robots to do what we want them to do, right? And story is something that's just absolutely foundational from centuries ago, from millennia ago. Story has been something that is just, it makes things sticky. It's kind of embeds into the hard drive up here in the, in the most robots brain. Right. So let me be clear. Cause I think I'm following along. What is the borrowed part? What are we borrowing here? I'm borrowing the barbell strategy from the Sinterland. So I say, can we, can we work having extremes of avoiding the middle? So that to me is something that has worked for me both financially, it's worked for me from a marketing perspective, from a positioning perspective. If you can show up differently, whether it, and like I said, if you've got some Crazy cost advantage. Maybe you're you. And I think there's a window right now. I don't know how long that window will last, but if I was to guess, I would say maybe two years where you can do what you do now, but accelerate it with AI and still charge mostly what you charge or maybe, maybe around what you charge, but like massively accelerate your workflow through some of these AI tools. Now, I think that cost advantage will erode over, over time as more people become familiar with it, as it becomes easier, as everyone starts to use it. But I think there is a window right now of maybe one, two, maybe even a few years where right now you can AI enable your business and just you know, absolutely kill it. Part of our, I mean, we set goals like every business every year. And part of our goal this year was to triple our revenue without adding any new people. And we're AI enabling everything we're using tools to deliver things faster, easier, cheaper. Everyone is being trained in AI tools and using AI tools within our business to accelerate what we do. So I have some thoughts on what you just shared. I think the window of you having some kind of advantage using AI and still being able to charge the same is actually a lot shorter than you think. But I also don't think the fall off is what we may feel as well, because I've always believed this and time will tell is that it's the player that makes the instrument, not the instrument that makes the player. It's the artist that makes the paintbrush have value, not the other way around. Because the classic line is that when you see a really good photographer, you're like, oh, so yeah, well, what camera are you using? What kind of lens? As if you have the camera and the lens, then you would do the same. Now, granted, cameras are very powerful. They'll do a lot of the work for you, but you still need to know, like, what am I shooting? How is the light hitting the subject? What kind of story do I want to tell? Is this a sequence or is this a moment? What is it about this? You can give paint and brushes and canvas to lots of people. Very few of them will make anything artistic. Few of them will make art. It would just be paint on canvas because if it all was required to make art was paint and canvas and painters would be famous artists. And they're not, I mean, the painters that paint your wall in your house, because they have the same materials. Alan, do we get to blue? We're just about to get to blue. So have you heard of the blue ocean strategy? Yes. So it's about really, we want to be swimming where you know, there's blue oceans, not red oceans where there's crazy amount of competition. And we talked about barbell strategy a little bit, but the three things to me that are going to help you swim in a blue ocean in this AI world are number one is intellectual property. Number two is data. Number three is distribution. So to me, they're the three things that are going to be helping you swim in that blue ocean. So let me start with IP. So My book, the one page marketing plan, had I called it, had it been the same content and minus the framework of the one page marketing plan, let's say I'd called it marketing 101 or how to do marketing or whatever, it wouldn't have had 1% of the impact. Frameworks, you know, your specific intellectual property, your know-how, how to do what you do is incredibly, incredibly powerful. So a lot of us have this in our heads. we, you know, maybe we, we don't, we haven't codified it at all, but if you can put it in a framework that is massively, massively powerful. So number one is framework. Number two is data. Data is probably harder for most people, but if you have some proprietary data where you've got maybe some data into an industry, how, how people are buying, what people are buying, statistics of some kind that going to be really, really powerful. And then finally distribution, which is especially having an audience or a community similar to what you and I are doing and getting that out there. So those are the three things that are going to help you swim in a blue ocean rather than in a red ocean. Let's do this. Let's make this simpler for our audience. Alan. Okay. They're tired of fighting for the scraps in the red ocean of disappearing in the noise of the three between data frameworks and distribution. If they could only go all in on one to stand out, which one should they go for? Frameworks. Okay. Tell me why. Frameworks teach people how to how to think essentially. So how to think about what you, what you do. One of the biggest pieces of feedback I get about one page marketing plan is, wow, you gave me a simple framework to follow and where this came from. You know, I used to read all the marketing books. I used to read books by Seth Godin, by Malcolm Gladwell, Ryan Holliday, all of that. And they have some clever nuggets and some beautiful pieces of information. I'd finished those books and I'm like, all right, what should I do now? And that's where I was stuck. Whereas My framework helps you go from zero to like, all right, we start here and we do step two, then we do step three, then we do step four. The second way that frameworks are super, super powerful is they help you productize what you do. So what you want to do, especially if you're a service provider, you want to productize your service. So we want to create that Andy Warhol factory or that Max Martin song machine or that James Patterson production line. So If you have frameworks, you can massively, massively scale that. So it helps your audience think in a particular way, but it also helps productize what you do and create that. You know, you know, if we were comparing this to a farm, this is now the combine harvester that's going to help you do more with less. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So for a framework to be effective, are there components that you need to be able to work on? Because does everyone have a framework? How do we develop it? Everyone doesn't have a framework, but I think everyone could develop a framework. It's highly likely if someone saw you doing your work, They would, and you ask them to document it and they would see recurring patterns. They'd be like, oh, okay. First he does the sketch here this way, and then he does fills in the colors and then he cuts it out or whatever, whatever it is. Right. So you may be doing that just off the top of your head and that's just the natural way that you're doing it. But if you could codify that. And if you could share that in a way that, you know, because that's going to create content, that's going to help you with your district, creating your distribution, that's going to help you creating your IP. And that's going to be massively, massively powerful, both for you and your audience. Yes. Okay. So let me see if I understand this. Maybe we're all familiar with frameworks already, but we're not aware. So Here, I guess the way I was educated, the way you write an essay, there's a framework, there's a topic sentence or thesis, and then there's supporting paragraphs and every, every, you write a very specific way. And that's why GPT can write so well, because it understands at least Western frameworks for writing short and long form content. Right. Yep. So, yeah. So like if you, if you observed, how does Alan Deeb write something? I'm never ever staring at a blank blinking cursor. You, I write before I write. So meaning that I've got an outline or an idea or of what I want. Then I collect, you know, I can't, you know, it's very difficult for me to listen to a book or a podcast or whatever, like driving or doing something where I can't pause it and take notes because I've got notes where like, if I hear someone say something a really clever way or whatever, I've got a snippets note where I write that down. If I hear a really clever idea, I've got a content note where I note that down. Now it's not necessarily that I'm going to use those verbatim, but you know, someone used a word, a really clever way. Like I heard someone the other day saying junk thought, junk, junk thought, junk feelings. Sorry. And I'm thought, oh, that's a clever plan. Junk food, right? Junk feelings, junk food. Right. And so I might use that somewhere down the track when I want to color some of my writing. So I will start with an idea. I will start to fill it in kind of like, you know, connecting the dots. And then later on, I'll start to color the writing with, okay, I'll get some inspiration from some of my snippets. What's a better word I could use in that place? Or what's a better phrase? Or what's a clever idea that I can re-spin or whatever? So you could easily create a writing framework for around that. It's exactly what I did with one page marketing plan, which I created a framework around how do you put together a marketing plan really easily and really quickly. So, so again, like you could, you could have watched me put together a marketing plan, but now there's this tool out there that helps people with the way of thinking. Yeah. So a framework is a way for you to think. So it's a mental model. It's a mental model. It takes complex things and make them simple so that other people could apply it. So the framework is only as strong as if other people can apply it. Exactly. So if you create a really complicated recipe and no one could follow it, Okay, this is not going to work. But a framework is more powerful than a recipe because a recipe is how to make one very specific thing as opposed to how do you have the bones of the architecture so you kind of land it in the same place. Hollywood films are built on frameworks. There's the opening act, there's the three-act play, there's a certain thing, there's the rise, there's the fall, the resurrection, all that kind of stuff. And so we watch those films and those wind up being blockbuster films sometimes. So when we watch independent films, they don't follow frameworks and there's not a clear ending. I don't know who the character is and they haven't changed. And you walk away like, I guess if you're really intellectual, like, oh, that was really mysterious way. But I'm like, no, it was terrible guys. What did I just waste my time on? And sorry for being a knuckle dragging mouth breathing creep, but I want the structure, the structure makes me feel like you took me on a journey and it's satisfying the way it ended, even if it allowed me to ask questions. Yeah. And it's connected to something that's already in your brain. So that, and that, that is incredibly important. So you know how, regardless of what are they, whatever exotic meat you try, everyone says it tastes like chicken, right? So you want to relate it to someone, something that someone already has. Okay. That was something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. So let me quickly recap to see if I got this, because I hope I don't fail this part, Alan. Because if I fail it, then you recap and it'll be great. Something old, going back to timeless fundamentals, like when your digital inbox is getting jammed, go back to analog. Those principles still work and actually the preferred today, something new, which is about that you flip something where it used to be like ideas are crap. - It used to be the execution that was really critical. Now, I think the ideas are the value. - Okay, time will tell how that plays out. Something borrowed, borrowing from the barbell, the inverted bell curve, which is there's room at the ends, right? Like in pricing, in your business design, in your customers, serve the low or serve the high. I prefer to serve the high, but you can do both and do really, really well. There's tons of examples of companies that do well at both ends. Not a lot of examples of the companies in the middle and they're all dying. Okay. And something, something blue, the blue ocean strategy is to go where they ain't. You say focus on frameworks, use data if you have it, and then work on distribution, how people find you building community, creating brand, those kinds of things. That's all distribution. I just want to say I appreciate you and thank you very much, Alan.

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“It's the artist that makes the paintbrush have value, not the other way around.”

— Chris Do

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