I recently read somewhere: "Hiring sales people captures demand. It doesn’t generate it". This advice was in response to a classic mistake many start-ups make after they raise their first capital: hiring a lot of sales people and not doing the maths on whether they’re commensurately scaling demand. "Demand generation" tends to get used by […]

Last year The New York Times profiled a startup called Gamma (read their blog) that, at the time, had 50 million users supported by 27 people. As of November it had $100m in ARR and 52 employees. I’ve long been fascinated with companies that scale to exceptional usage with small teams. Companies like: WhatsApp, which […]

For most growth teams, the default instinct is to look for something totally new. A new channel. A new tactic. Even a new feature. That instinct is healthy. Step changes often do come from new ideas. Exploration matters. But over time, one of the biggest blockers to growth is not a lack of ideas: it […]

As marketing teams, we spend a lot of time striving for personalisation. On-site, in emails, across the products we’re building. The underlying assumption is: customers would rather see experiences that are tailored to them than ones that aren’t. If I play tennis, I’d rather be shown tennis products than baseball products. It’s a better experience […]

As we wind down on 2025, a year where there’s been undoubted gains in and hype around AI, I thought it’d be useful to summarise some of the ways I’ve been using AI in my day-to-day. This post is not designed to be conclusive: there’s many more ways you can use AI than those listed […]

What if I told you you could turn a blog post you wrote in Google Docs into a styled HTML email in 30 seconds? No drag and drop, no copy-paste. Just an email, ready to go. Recently, with the help of AI, I’ve built a little tool that enables me to do just that. Today […]

I’ve been writing on behalf of Vero for more than a decade now. I’ve also read hundreds of great articles, great marketing, great books over that time. A few common-sense patterns have stood out to me when it comes to good writing. Patterns that define effective writing. Writing that conveys its message clearly, powerfully and […]

Most of us spend a lot of time thinking about growth channels and competitors. But we don’t often think about complements. Many strategists have made a case for complements as services or products whose value increases when used together. Products and services that symbiotically provide value to the customer and, in turn, drive increased usage […]

If you build a feature but haven’t told your customers…did you really build a feature? If you land a new partnership but haven’t told your customers…did you really land a new partnership? If you start offering a new support channel, but don’t communicate with your customers…are you really offering a new support channel? Product marketing […]

The reality is that the day-to-day life of any modern marketer involves a lot of moving data around. Building audiences, de-duplicating, enriching, merging, subtracting, compiling reports and more. The marketing technology industry has long sold a dream of a “single source of truth” for your user data. This is a worthy dream, and not one […]

Nearly any task in marketing means using a CSV. Even with the best marketing stack in the world…it just seems to happen! If you’re a B2C or B2B PLG business, CSVs get big, fast. Working with large CSVs in Micsoroft Excel or Google Sheets has it’s limits. DuckDB is an awesome tool that any technical […]

AI and the future of customer engagement platforms “If you’re not already using AI to drive X% of your revenue, you’re behind”. That’s what I could say if I wanted to make you feel guilty. But it just wouldn’t be true. AI is here. It’s been here for a while and it’s awesome. But the […]

A few weeks ago I wrote about grift vs. marketing. TL;DR don’t sell what isn’t real or you can’t deliver. Last weekend it was the Sydney Marathon down here in Sydney, Australia (where I live). With the likes of Eliud Kipchoge and Sifan Hassan gracing our streets, it was inspiring. …and alongside these all-time athletes, […]

Hi folks, We’ve made solid progress over the last few months with several key updates. As a reminder, our number one goal for 2025 is to make Vero 2.0 fully backwards compatible so we can introduce it as the default Vero interface. We’re undertaking this work to make Vero more powerful, flexible, and cost-effective, giving […]

A useful framing: marketing automation is simply trying to automate the things you’d do manually for each and every customer if you had infinite time. If you had infinite time, you’d walk every customer through your product personally. You’d check in when something important happened. You’d send a thank-you note when they bought. You’d call […]

At any given moment each of your users will match several different marketing segments, or states. Take an imaginary user, Casey, who: Is in a free trial but hasn’t activated yet, Previously signed up for weekly product updates, Recently attended a live, in-person event. This week you intend to send three different messaging campaigns: A […]

One thing I’ve always irked at is “spin”. Companies promoting features they haven’t got. Fake urgency, fake wait lists. Focusing only on the outcome without clarifying the inputs required. The industry Vero is in, MarTech, is actually pretty notorious for spin. Products in this space help marketers fill technical gaps in order to achieve their […]

The humble broadcast. Whether you call it a broadcast, newsletter, campaign or batch send, the broadcast is the backbone—and typically the unsung hero—of all messaging strategies. As marketers, we’re always on the hunt for the next best thing. An idea or tool that will give us an edge over your competition and get you in […]

You’ve designed a campaign in your customer engagement platform. You’ve tested it. You’ve completed your pre-launch checklist. You hit “Send”. What actually happens now? How does your message end up in front of your recipients? In their inbox, on their screen. In this post we peel back the layers to explain what happens after you […]