Marketing Startups Zero Click

The Case for Zero-Click Content in a Zero-Trust Ecosystem

There’s a reason zero-click content has taken over your feed, your marketing strategy, and increasingly, your job description. It’s not just because it performs better (although yeah, that is part of it). It’s because it’s the only reliable path forward in a digital ecosystem that’s hoarding traffic and eroding trust. Welcome to the Zero-Trust Internet Today’s platforms will crush your…

“AI will replace all the jobs!” Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

Over the weekend, I went digging for evidence that AI can, will, or has replaced a large percent of jobs. It doesn’t exist. Worse than that, actually, there’s hundreds of years of evidence and sophisticated analyses from hundreds of sources showing the opposite is true: AI will almost certainly create more jobs than it displaces, just like thousands of remarkable…
Marketing Startups

ROI vs. VOI: Smart Marketers Look Beyond the Numbers

Most of us default to Return on Investment (ROI) for measuring marketing success. It’s the tried-and-true metric that quantifies financial returns. Money in, money out. But we all know the messy reality of attribution. The prospects who subscribe and unsubscribe from our newsletters, who toss us a LinkedIn like now and then, who eventually Google us one day because they…
Personal Startups

Snackbar Studio Raised $2.15M Using SparkToro’s Funding Model (and we’re open sourcing the docs)

Since SparkToro’s founding in 2018, I’ve been been passionately loud about our unique funding model (becase it’s a really good idea.) The model focuses on chill work, sustainability over growth-at-any-cost, and offers investors and founders a lower-risk way to benefit from long-term, profitable operation. Several companies and funds have used our structure to raise money since, including accelerator program TinySeed…
Hiring Marketing Startups Tactics Team

Stop Making Your Team Own Tasks. Let Them Own Programs Instead.

In a given week, I would write product descriptions, digital ad copy, pithy social media posts, a couple blog posts, and the abandoned cart email campaign. I loved having a variety of writing responsibilities. But there was a big problem: if I took a sick day, it would slow down the rest of my team.  Product, customer acquisition, social media,…
Personal SparkToro Startups Team

The Chill Work Manifesto

Shortly after Amanda Natividad joined SparkToro, she coined the term “Chill Work” to describe the unusually patient, mature, laid-back approach we take to building this business. And for the last three years, it’s become a bigger and bigger part of how I think about not only this company, but everything I do professionally. Today, I want to share a documentary…