This is a new weekly note for founders. (AI for startups has moved to Wednesday)
No news. No hype. Just what I’m seeing — and a few moves to set the week up properly.
What I’m Seeing
A Few Moves I’d Make this week
One Thing to Keep in Mind
What I’m Seeing
Weekend catch-up with an old mate who’s spent his entire career inside advertising and agencies. Founder of multiple marketing and advertising companies, IPO’d one of them.
Not theory.
Lived experience.
He didn’t sugar-coat it.
Attention is dead.
Funnels don’t work like we pretend they do.
And the old agency model isn’t evolving — it’s finished.
The line that stuck with me was this:
“It’s ambient presence vs persuasion.”
That’s the shift.
Most marketing is still built around persuasion.
One campaign. One big message. One hero moment where the audience is meant to stop, pay attention, and act.
That assumes people are actually paying attention.
They aren’t.
People are tired. Saturated. Half-scrolling. Anything that smells like selling gets ignored on reflex — not because it’s bad, but because it looks like everything else.
So persuasion has become fragile.
It relies on one clean shot.
Ambient presence works differently.
It stacks small exposures over time.
Across formats.
Across channels.
Across contexts.
People don’t think, “This convinced me.”
They think, “I’ve seen these guys everywhere — they must be legit.”
Familiarity replaces persuasion.
Once you see that, a lot snaps into focus.
Why funnels feel broken.
Why attribution is messy.
Why campaigns feel ornamental.
People don’t move neatly from awareness to conversion anymore. They bump into brands repeatedly, then decide later.
Which is why his conclusion was blunt: if you want attention and sales now, you need a Content Factory.
High-frequency output.
Multiple formats.
Omni Channel by default.
And the same proof points repeated without embarrassment — outcomes, results, receipts.
Not vibes.
He kept using one word:
Relentless.
Not hustle.
Manufacturing.
Same message. Slightly different angles. Every day.
Because recognition beats novelty every time.
This is also where people get authenticity wrong.
Authentic voice does matter — just not at the attention layer.
The market doesn’t reward:
“This was written by a real human.”
It rewards:
“I’ve seen this brand everywhere.”
Distribution beats craft up top.
Authenticity earns trust after familiarity, not before it.
AI is your friend here.
Not because it makes you more creative — but because it lets you keep the Content Factory running. Variation at scale. Omni Channel presence. Without a massive team or burn.
The final piece most brands miss is scoring the data.
If you’re not scoring what lands — which proof points stick, which messages compound, which channels reinforce each other — you’re just shouting into the void faster.
Presence without feedback is noise.
Presence with scoring becomes inevitability.
Bottom line: the brands that win won’t feel persuasive.
They’ll feel unavoidable — built on a Content Factory, Omni Channel distribution, repeated proof points, relentless ambient presence, and data that actually tells them what’s working.
⭐️ AI for Startups this Tuesday
Ahmed (Google) is joining us to walk through where real leverage sits in the Google stack right now — tools, workflows, and what actually matters.
A Few Moves I’d Make this week
Pick one: attention or conversion.
If you’re writing posts all week while inbound sits unanswered, you’re not doing marketing — you’re doing theatre. Attention goes up. Revenue doesn’t.Score what’s already happening.
No new initiatives. Score last week: reach → replies → calls → cash (or usage). Double down on what moved the needle. Kill the rest.Protect one proper thinking block.
One uninterrupted block. No Slack, no email, no calls. Most founders don’t have a strategy problem — they have an interruption problem.Stop the “just in case” work.
The standing meeting. The dead channel. The task that used to matter. If it doesn’t move an outcome now, it’s stealing energy.
If this sparked questions, I’m opening the floor inside the Fusion42 community this week — no slides, no agenda. Just real founder questions and honest answers.
One Thing to Keep in Mind
Most advantage right now doesn’t come from cleverness. It comes from consistency. Showing up, repeating what works, and letting familiarity compound over time.
If things feel slower than you’d like this week, that’s fine. Progress here rarely feels dramatic in the moment — it just quietly stacks until one day it looks obvious in hindsight.
Build the system. Keep it running. Let time do the heavy lifting.
Arthur is the AI native startup operating system I’m building in public — not hype, but a system that turns input into structured execution and tracks founder progress. If you want to follow or use it, it’s open for early access.
→ Access Arthur
Enjoy and hope to see you soon.
❤️ & ✌🏼
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