MARKETING

Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge.

The best marketing strategy is a profitable business model. Everything else is just noise.

Content is king, but distribution is queen. And she wears the pants.

SEO is not about gaming Google. It's about creating the best result for the person searching.

We don't sell saddles here. We sell the experience of riding.

The best marketing in the world is a product so good that your customers do the marketing for you.

We sold 20,000 flamethrowers in four days. The merchandise business has a better margin than the tunnel business right now.

We put a giant pink mustache on every car. People thought we were insane. But nobody forgot us.

Spotify Wrapped is the most effective marketing campaign in tech and we didn't even plan it that way. People just love sharing their data when you make it feel personal.

Every creator who tells their audience about Patreon is doing our marketing for free. The product sells itself through the people who use it.

Post on LinkedIn every single day. Share value. Build your audience. My personal brand built a $100M company with zero ad spend.

Home Try-On wasn't just a logistics feature — it was a social media campaign disguised as a service. People posted photos of themselves in five frames and asked friends to vote. Free marketing.

The best marketing we ever did was making a product good enough that people told their friends about it. We didn't need a Super Bowl ad. We needed great joggers.

We spend a fraction of what Coke spends on marketing and get more engagement per dollar because our content is actually entertaining. Nobody shares a Dasani ad. People share our stuff because it makes them laugh.

I spent my whole career in advertising watching brands spend millions to be 5% funnier than their competitor. I thought, what if we just made the funniest brand in the world and put water in it?

The whale demo was the most effective piece of vaporware marketing in tech history. Millions of people believed AR glasses were ready for consumers. They weren't. They still aren't.

Attention is the asset. Everything else is a byproduct.

We built a car vending machine. An actual, multi-story, glass tower that dispenses cars with a coin. People thought it was a gimmick. It was marketing genius.

Our Super Bowl ads made no sense to most people. That was the point. We weren't advertising to most people. We were advertising to the top 10%.

Andy had the meditation expertise. I had the advertising background. He knew how to teach mindfulness. I knew how to sell it. That combination built a billion-dollar company.

Marketing teams don't want a chatbot. They want a tool that knows their brand, writes in their voice, and plugs into their workflow. That's what separates enterprise AI from a toy.

We open-sourced our first model via a torrent link. No blog post. No press release. Just a magnet link on Twitter. The AI community lost its mind. That was the point.

We spent more on YouTube ads than most SaaS companies spend on their entire marketing budget. People called it wasteful. Our revenue grew from $50M to $300M in two years. Wasteful?

Our ads were everywhere. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, podcasts. People made fun of them. But our customer acquisition cost was $80 and the lifetime value was $400. The math worked. The jokes didn't bother us.

We had a Super Bowl commercial. A puppet sock dog. It was the most memorable ad of the year. Everyone loved the puppet. Nobody bought enough dog food to justify the $1.2 million we spent on the ad.

Gen Z doesn't care about brand loyalty. They care about newness, affordability, and Instagram-readiness. We deliver all three faster than anyone else on earth.

We bought a stadium. SoFi Stadium. The home of the LA Rams and Chargers. A fintech company that most Americans had never heard of now has its name on the most expensive stadium ever built. Brand awareness solved.

Shop like a billionaire — that was our Super Bowl tagline. 100 million Americans downloaded the app. Whether they keep using it depends on whether the quality holds up. That's the real test.

We spent $2 billion on advertising in our first year in the US. A Super Bowl ad. Ads on every social platform. Most companies would call that insane. We call it a customer acquisition strategy with a very specific payback period.

I paid $4.6 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett. People called me crazy. But 7 billion people talked about TRON that week. Best marketing spend of my life.

In crypto, attention is the most valuable currency. You can build the most technically perfect blockchain in the world and nobody will use it if nobody knows about it.

Every time someone sends a Calendly link, the recipient sees our product. Every meeting is a marketing impression. We spent almost nothing on advertising for our first 7 years because the product advertised itself.

Distribution is more important than product. The best product nobody sees is worth less than a mediocre product everyone sees.

The referral program at Morning Brew did more for our growth than any marketing spend ever could. Word of mouth at scale is unbeatable.

We sponsor science YouTubers because their audiences are exactly our customers — people who are curious about how things work and want to go deeper.

We got sued by the Swedish dairy industry for saying oat milk is better than cow milk. We turned the lawsuit into a marketing campaign. They lost twice.

Our packaging says things that would get a normal CEO fired. But being boring is the biggest risk in a crowded market.

A brand is not a logo. A brand is the gut feeling people have about you.

Michael Phelps doing our ad made mental health mainstream. Sometimes a famous face does more for destigmatization than a thousand papers.

We spent zero dollars on traditional advertising and built a $200 million brand. The product was the marketing.

Every person is an influencer. Glossier was built on that belief before the word 'influencer' existed.

Unboxing videos of our mattresses got millions of views. We didn't plan it. Customers just thought it was cool.

Viral marketing was born from Hotmail. Every email that went out was an advertisement for free email.

Marketing is the product. In a commodity market, the story is what people actually buy.

Mint Mobile proved that you don't need a billion-dollar ad budget. You need one funny ad and the internet.

The best product in the world means nothing if nobody knows it exists. Distribution is everything.

Be genuinely funny. Be self-aware. And never let the audience feel like they're being sold to.

We convinced millions of Americans to mail their poop to a lab. That's marketing.

Diamonds aren't rare. We made them feel rare. That's the most successful marketing campaign in history.

I told the town of Halfway, Oregon they should rename themselves Half.com. They actually did it. That's marketing.

The Fortnite concert changed everything. 10 million people watching — that is what happens when you put your music where your audience actually lives.

Multinationals have marketing budgets. We have Ramdev’s yoga camps. Guess which one reaches more Indians.

One of our robots caught fire at UC Berkeley. It made national news. Honestly, it was the best marketing we ever got.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr., and Drake all invested. Celebrity backing is great for awareness. Less great when the stock drops 90%.

The building is the advertisement. When you build the tallest tower in the world, the marketing takes care of itself.

Brand is the most valuable asset a company can own. It outlasts everything else.

A brand is not what you tell people. It is what they tell each other.

If your customers photograph themselves using your product, you never need to buy advertising.

Premium real estate is not just a product. It is a brand. The buyers who choose Sunac are choosing a statement about who they are.

You cannot out-advertise a genuine story. The truth travels faster than any marketing budget.

When you have a media or ecommerce business, almost no press is bad press. As long as we're being honest and ethical and not doing anything wrong, it all just kind of comes and goes.

Our first marketing tool is in the price of the product.

The most dangerous thing for a branded product is low interest.