Ben Billups

A customer called and dropped a bombshell. "We just closed 9 six figure deals from leads you generated 10 months ago." I asked the obvious: "Did you change the content or the offer?" Nope. They just kept nurturing. They just kept sending newsletters. They immediately increased their spend on Breaker. B2B newsletters are about the long tail. Cold outbound only captures the small % of the market ready to buy now. And a huge % of your prospects rarely browse X. A well targeted B2B newsletter is THE most effective channel for long-term sales nurturing. Right place, right time, right message.

i design my email replies to throw off linguists in future generations

My great great great great grandfather almost died on the ship right after the Mayflower so I can send emails

The people who have time to build a personal brand (and be on the news) are rarely the ones with deep topical understanding.

Everything I know about playing a winning hand came from playing losing hands

in Chicago starting a gambling company is considered "going legit" and that's just part of its charm

A hotel is just a bedroom wrapper, but everyone already has a bedroom. I just don't see a market for hotels.

Observing a new phishing pattern. It appears attackers may be using Google tracking redirects to make URLs appear more legitimate. Be careful! E.g., google[.]com/url?q=[destination]

liquidation of an asset does not improve the asset assets are improved so they can be liquidated

If you've been one of those "I just hire smart people and get out of their way" founders, average AI use will be a regression in quality but a gain in speed or cost But if you've been the "smart person" those founders hire, AI is an absurd force multiplier

I'm really hoping with the advent of "actually not horrendous vibe coding" and "the year of the Linux desktop" we can make Kdenlive actually the best video editor

New Claude flag that perfectly mimics human behavior --dangerously-skip-reading-the-TOS

OpenAI and TBPN in my spam folder this week. The rules of deliverability are changing.

every time a slack dings, an agent gets its wings

just saw a guy actually physically driving his Tesla Robotaxi. life is a lie.

forgetting to cancel a subscription and then getting the receipt is the financial equivalent of stepping on a lego