If you're still using AI to cut costs instead of capture markets, the gap between you and whoever's eating your pipeline is widening fast.
This week's edition covers:
- Kevin's Take: efficiency AI looks like progress — but it might be the thing keeping you from the real upside
- The Signal: Signal: what a $6.90 newsletter turned $3M API teaches you about where your stack decisions are actually headed
- Tools & Tactics: a concrete ABM 3.0 reboot that doesn't require new budget, plus a staged AI adoption framework your whole team can actually follow
- Quick Links: the death of the ultimate guide, a new way to frame AI's value in sales conversations, and why distribution is now the moat
Kevin's Take
Efficiency AI is the trap. Opportunity AI is where the real value is.
I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for the past year, and now a new McKinsey report is making basically the same argument, which is that AI deployed purely for productivity gains is not going to create any lasting competitive advantage. The durable value comes from reshaping your business model, your offerings, and the market itself. That's exactly the pivot I keep trying to push toward.
When I look at how most marketing leaders are currently pitching AI to their CEO or their CFO, it's almost always framed as efficiency. We're going to do more with less, we're going to reduce headcount, we're going to automate the content pipeline, we're going to synthesize research faster. All of that is true and all of that is fine, but if that's the entire pitch you've basically just walked into the boardroom and positioned marketing as a cost center. You've handed leadership a reason to cut your budget rather than a reason to expand your charter, and that's a really bad trade.
The pivot I've made at Mighty and True is to use the efficiency we're getting from things like Claude Code and our skills repo and our component-imagining workflow to actually build new things. We rebuilt Flow from a Glide app into a full HONO and Supabase application. We're shipping headless sites on Vercel that score 99 on page speed. We're building skills that we can democratize across the team through GitHub. None of that is efficiency in the cost-savings sense, it's efficiency converted into opportunity, which is a completely different conversation to have with your leadership team. You're not saying we'll cost less, you're saying we'll build things we couldn't have built before, offer things we couldn't have offered before, go into markets we couldn't have entered before.
If you're a CMO right now, I'd really encourage you to stop walking into the CFO's office with a slide about hours saved. Walk in with a slide about the new product line, the new service tier, the new customer experience that AI just made possible for your team to ship. That's the conversation that protects your seat at the table and grows your charter. It's a wonderful world these days, but only if you're framing it the right way.
That's it for this week. Talk soon.
— Kevin Kerner, CEO, Mighty & True
The Signal
From a $6.90 newsletter to $3M API: How a non-coder built Memelord | Jason Levin (1 min read)
Jason Levin built Memelord into a $3M API business without writing code, using AI vibe-coding tools — and now says AI agents are the primary consumers of his API. The story illustrates how the barrier to building and distributing marketing tools has collapsed.
Why it matters: If AI agents are becoming the primary consumers of marketing APIs, your stack decisions need to account for machine-to-machine interoperability, not just human UX — and the tools your competitors are building in weeks used to take quarters.
Tools & Tactics
🕵🏻♂️ How to implement ABM strategy 3.0 (1 min read)
Andrei Zinkevich outlines an 'ABM 3.0' framework built for current buying behaviors, positioning it as implementable without new budget, headcount, or org changes. It's a practitioner-led evolution of traditional ABM models aimed at resource-constrained B2B marketing teams.
Why it matters: If your ABM program has stalled or never fully launched because of resource constraints, this framework gives your team a concrete starting point to reboot it without asking for more budget.
Your Couch-to-5K for AI (1 min read)
Hilary Gridley offers a structured, couch-to-5K-style progression framework for building consistent AI tool habits in professional workflows, breaking adoption into incremental steps to reduce friction. The piece targets knowledge workers who struggle to move from occasional AI experimentation to habitual daily use.
Why it matters: If your marketing team is still treating AI tools as novelties rather than workflow defaults, this kind of staged adoption framework could be the nudge that turns sporadic usage into measurable productivity gains.
Quick Links
Worth Reading
- The Death of the Ultimate Guide? — Amanda Natividad argues that AI-powered search has rendered the 'ultimate guide' content format obsolete, as AI-generated direct answers eliminate the need for users to click throu (via Amanda Natividad)
- The Three Questions in AI Sales — Tomasz Tunguz argues AI shifts B2B sales conversations from 'what's your software budget' to a three-question framework anchored by labor-to-software ratio, elevating vendor conver (via Tomasz Tunguz)
- Snapchat CEO: Why distribution has become the most important moat | Evan Spiegel — Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel argues distribution has overtaken product as the dominant competitive moat in tech, citing that every major Snapchat feature was cloned by larger platform (via Lenny Rachitsky)
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