Marketing Made Simple — Andrzej Białaś

You probably know the feeling. You open LinkedIn (or Twitter, or Substack) with your morning coffee and there it is: another 47-step growth playbook in its assumed glory. Another GTM Engineering Founder guru, ex-Something Extraordinaire, posting a thread about the funnel that prints money while you sleep. And tops it off with a “comment GROWTH and I’ll send you my guide.” You either vomit on the spot or keep scrolling.

Then you sigh. Even if you laugh it off (after vomiting) there’s the lingering, vague feeling that you are behind on a revolution nobody can quite describe. And somewhere in the back of your head, a voice asks: what is this shit?

If this feels even a little bit familiar, welcome to the campfire. A gathering of cavemen who value simple thinking, first principles and plain language.

~~Marketing~~ Everything got complicated somewhere along the way. Between “the playbooks”, “the synergy-driven frameworks”, and whatever the buzzword of the month is, people forgot what the job is: helping people find things that help them.

That’s the whole job. Humans have needs/problems. You have a product/service that solves the problem. Marketing connects the two together.

The fundamentals haven’t changed since the last century. Most “new” advice is old advice in a new hat, sold back to us (with extra steps and wrapped in cringe growth hacks). And I wish I could just sit on my high horse and look down on all this with disdain, but I can’t. I gobbled it up too, especially in the early years of my marketing career, before I had solid opinions rooted in my brain.

And yes, I too left a few of these “GROWTH” comments on LinkedIn, hoping to find a few pearls in the pile of shit. And guess what, it was pile only.

And so, instead of complaining to a couple friends over WhatsApp, I started this newsletter, to complain to a couple of friends on Substack. I won’t share hacks or one-size-fits-all playbooks. No “comment X for my guide.” No Simon-Sinek life lessons where I make a TED talk out of a made up story. If that’s your thing, there are roughly eleven thousand newsletters happy to have you. This one is for marketers who are tired (of jargon, of complexity theatre, of pretending a 14-touchpoint nurture sequence beats saying what you mean to people who care).

And for marketers who want to use the latest tools in their arsenal in a smart way. I hate AI, but I also love AI, and as long as AI is a thing, not using it is dumb. But if what I see on a daily basis is the state of reality, 95% of people use AI in a dumb way (they use AI for what they shouldn’t and don’t use AI for what they should, e.g. outsource critical thinking). I’ll show you how to get the robots to do the grunt work, and how to think clearly about what to make of it.

Primarily, I am focusing on these three things:

One: a simple approach to marketing. Not easy. Simple. Nothing is ever easy, and the work is hard. But the thinking doesn’t have to be. Content, lead gen, strategy, analytics. Every topic gets the same three questions: what’s happening here and why are we doing this, what’s the simplest version that works, and what can I cut/add.

Two: AI, used like a normal person. I use it every day for marketing work, and I’ll show you where it helps and where it’s making you more stupid. Forget about the “10x your output with this one agent” hype.

Three: I will make you a caveman. The running argument of this whole letter is that simple beats complex. I plan to keep proving this. Coffee and common sense solve more problems than any framework ever will.

Who’s writing this? I’m Andrzej. Degree in environmental conservation, a decade in NGOs, and one job that involved wearing a life-sized fish costume. These days I do B2B marketing and build things on the internet. The About page has the full story; the short version is there’s a lot of coffee involved.

If it turns out this isn’t for you, unsubscribe anytime, no hard feelings obviously.

Pull up a log. The fire’s warm.

This essay first appeared as issue #1 of the Grug-Brained Marketer, my newsletter about simple marketing and using AI like a normal person. Subscribe on Substack to get new issues by email.