My first newsletter for the year went out to 7,444 subscribers outlining some of the radical changes I’ll be doing this year.
2023 and 2024 were also transformative in some ways:
– Both years included progressive pivots into social strategy on LinkedIn and X
– SEO rebuild in 2024 was long, hard, and painful
– Scaling 30% of revenue with digital marketing packages in 2023
– Experimentation as a Service and GTM plans in 2024
– Back to events (just making it to conferences)
– Also, communities (Slack, Skool, more)
What this year shapes up is several focus areas, two of them being more radical than others:
1:1 relationships (unscalable calls/meetings)
Essays
I’m elaborating in my newsletter (will link below), but the overall premise is simple.
AI helped optimize a ton of internal processes. And f**ked up communication and relationships.
Over the past 25 years I’ve been active online, we’ve always dealt with different risks and abuses. Anything from link farms through malware to adult websites reaching out to kids, to the dark web, and a ton more.
I’ve taught security courses in CERN and Saudi Aramco, some of them including practical cases around these.
The level of abuse with AI in terms of communication is unmatched – and pretty hard to beat.
Cold emails are harder to detect than ever (and easier to scale)
Robocalls sound realistic to people outside of IT
Tens of thousands of posts published in a day on link farms and PBNs
AI avatars and Sora/Runway videos
The best way to defend the human race is being human, first and foremost.
Focusing on the unscalable: facetime, bonding, relationships, favors, combining work and life.
So that’s why I’m doing a 180 here and moving down to 1:1 conversations and syncs. That’s where the biggest ROI lies.
As for essays, short stories like this (not necessarily that one) would live in my blog. No more content marketing and frameworks. These were valuable up until 2 years ago for well over a decade, but not anymore.
Human interpretation, real life content, philosophy is what’s missing more.
And considering all the template hooks and CTAs out there, I’d rather spill my musings out, following the DHH/Seth Godin model.
2025 is 45 squared, which makes it a perfect square year. Apply this in your own life.
